How it feels #1

So it's only three weeks until I fly out of Amsterdam Schiphol, back to America. Every hour, now, someone asks me "Are you looking forward to moving back home?" (and I explain "Chicago has never been home to me.") or someone asks me "Do you like the US or the Netherlands better?" (and I bite my tongue not to answer "Yes.") or someone asks me the really hard question..."How does it feel to be leaving?"

Indeed. How does it feel?

I'll post later with a better considered answer. But for now, this short and very personal answer will have to suffice. While it is not enough, and while I feel enough churning inside me that I know there will be more elaboration later, here's my best answer at the moment:

The US is a somewhat better place to work.
The Netherlands is a much better place to live.

This is no sentimental answer. Both nations have problems, but on the whole, Americans work harder and reap the financial rewards for it--but the Dutch are simply more adult. The Dutch understand that money is a means to a good life, not a guarantee of it. Americans make more money but stay frustrated. The Dutch understand that lasting security is the fruit of justice, not of brute force. American society resembles a young person who hasn't yet figured this out. Europeans wait with a teacher's patient hope that this strong, young, and wildly impulsive member of world society will turn out fine, after all.

In all my Netherlands cycling travels (more than 3200 km now), no one has given me so much as a frown. I have been helped at every turn, and when I don't ask for anything, no one pays any attention to me or to my cutting through dirt roads, or taking photos, or taking my bike on or off the train even at busy hours, or stuttering in their language, or making minor mistakes with money. The Dutch simply assume that you are an adult, that your intentions are private ("eigen", a wonderful and very Dutch word), and they assume without thinking that your intentions are harmless. No one in this country has made me feel anxious even by mistake, and that's during an entire year. The Dutch assume that if you have made a mistake, it is a reasonable one.

And then I think about moving back to the US, to Chicago, and I read this recent article...and I want to burst into tears. I worry that I am moving back into a nation whose best days are over, that I am buying a stock on its way down. I worry that Soros is right in saying that empires' Golden Ages last a century, that America has had its century, and that I am moving back just as it is ending. History teaches that empire declines can be sudden and very, very unpleasant. What will endure? I think of the Netherlands 50 years from now, and I see a place very much as it is now. I think of the US 50 years from now and...I'm not sure what I see. More power poles and jails and security checkpoints, perhaps. More guys with suits and binoculars.

The freedom-loving part of me wants to clutch onto Dutch soil with ten fingernails and ten toenails.

Look--I know that millions would move to the US and its freedom and its money. The irony is not lost on me.

Still, my friends go on asking. Here is the first part of my answer. Here is part of How It Feels.