After much thought, I’ve decided to renew my “rental” of the LeavingAmerika.com domain for another year.
I launched this blog 3 years or so ago, after the election of 2016. Originally the URL was nicalebela.wordpress.com, because I thought that my wife and I might be moving to Nice, France, in 2017.
I had realized soon after that disastrous election that people of Arab ethnicity and/or liberal political inclination would have an increasingly difficult time of it in the United States.
It was obvious that a malignant opportunist was ready to engage in a scorched earth campaign for fun and profit.
Nothing that has happened since then has caused me to change my mind in that regard.
If anything, things have turned out to be far worse than I anticipated — though the mass roundup of Arab-Americans for dispatch to remote concentration camps, WW2 style, has yet to transpire.
So what now?
Why keep a blog going that few people read?
I think it boils down to the fact that born writers write. That is what people like us do. If we don’t, something’s wrong, missing. You feel aimless. Writing on a daily basis to someone who is a writer is akin to breathing. Stop, and you in effect die.
This is why I’ve renewed LeavingAmerika.com.
It is my marker that, despite all the disappointments and misfires, that I still hold on to the dream that one day I shall find my way to a place I can finally call home.
During the coming year, I shall write about 3 things in this blog:
- dogs, specifically Geneva, our beautiful new German shep puppy who is arriving in 17 days;
- weight loss / getting fit; and,
- books (mainly fiction) / and literary theory (don’t worry, I shan’t go overboard with that).
I hope, for the most part, to avoid politics — except perhaps when I attend the Palestinian Literary festival in Manhattan in March.
To sum up.
The Internet is strewn with the cacasses of countless well-meaning but ignored blogs into which creative and even not so creative people have poured out their hearts without expecting much in return.
The world is cruelly indifferent, yet there is always a chance your screwed up life will turn up all right in the end — despite the ruthless and unceasing efforts of zealots the world over to snuff out that which refuses to be like them.
One day, LeavingAmerica shall be no more. It, too, shall become a silent testament, another grim heap of bleached bones in the Internet’s death valley, another digital skull laying in wordless vigil on the hot, cracked earth, with uncaring vultures circling the cloudless sky above.
But until then, enjoy the ride.
Leaving Amerika 