Federal Government Shutdown

[Airyaman]

Now envy me for my goverment bitches!

I've been trying to convince my husband we need to move to Finland for years... Germany has made the list of countries I'd move to. I got totally bitch-slapped (figuratively) by a German hotel worker when we were visiting Berlin in 2003, right after the US invasion of Iraq. The hotel had everyone put their national flag on their breakfast table, but I swapped ours with a Canadian flag out of the shame of being an American. I discovered Germans take the whole nationality thing a wee bit further than we do... I explained that I was ashamed that we were attacking a country on false pretenses, didn't make a bit of difference to the hotel guy. He told me I was an American and I should be proud of that... but I'm really kinda not.

But I recently discovered that if I get a nursing degree, I can move to Denmark. Nurses are on their "positive list," they need more nurses, and the government will aid in immigration if you are one. Plan: Get my degree, learn Danish, get Danish certification, get Danish job, BOOM! I'm an ex-pat. I'd be SO happy :-)

Of course this isn't going to happen, but a girl can dream, right? I'll dream my dreams of sane governments, socialized safety nets, majority non-religious populations, strong unions... le sigh... Husband says we've got to change the US from inside, don't give up hope and all that... Bah! I'm too much a realist for that. IF they're lucky, maybe my kids will see some real changes... Maybe... and that's waffling...

I'm going to see how much the Danish version of Rosetta Stone costs...

Posts like yours are why you should be for less federal government and more local and state. I'm personally for less government in all aspects but I can understand that some people think government is a decent thing.

When you speak of Denmark you can compare it, population wise, to Wisconsin. Germany is like California, New York, and Texas. People sometimes fail to realize that central government is woefully inefficient for a country our size, and things would be much better if states had more power. If there was a state that had many of the things you desire with a central government that stayed within its constitutional limits, then you could just move to that state and not to another country across the world. That is the way it should work, but instead we are forcing everyone to stick the square peg in the round hole.

I live in the rural south (I'll wait on the insults for that one), so how many of us want to live here might not agree with how you would like to live.

People say the Mass care is well like and successful. Bravo, state power. That is how health care should be approached instead of at a national level with 314 million people across fifty states and thousands of cities and towns.