Monday, April 10, 2017

Want To Get Away From It All?

The Sunday before last November’s election, I ran a story about a joke website set up in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to attract Americans who wanted to move there in case Trump won.

Well, they’re doing a land-office business.

The first sign of what Rob Calabrese would come to think of as America’s unmooring began last year, just after Donald Trump won his first presidential primary and Calabrese published a $28 website that he’d designed in 30 minutes. “Hi Americans!” it began, and what followed was a sales pitch for an island where Muslims could “roam freely,” and where the only walls were those “holding up the roofs” of “extremely affordable houses.”

“Let’s get the word out!” Calabrese wrote, adding a photo of an empty coastline along the Atlantic Ocean. “Move to Cape Breton if Donald Trump Wins!”

It was meant as a joke — but seven hours after Calabrese linked the site to the Facebook page of the pop radio station where he works as a DJ, in came an email from America. “Not sure if this is real but I’ll bite.” And then another: “It pains me to think of leaving, but this country is beyond repair.”

And then more. Within 24 hours, there were 80 messages. Within a week, there were 2,000, and many used the same words: “nervous” and “terrified” and “help.”

“The United States is losing its mind,” one person wrote.

“So ashamed of half of my country I could curl up and cry,” wrote another.

The emails kept coming, so many that soon the island’s tourism association brought on four seasonal workers to help respond to the inquiries, which were arriving from every state and hundreds of towns, until it seemed to Calabrese that America was filled with people who wanted to get away.

“Look at this one,” he said one day recently, scrolling through a spreadsheet where the inquiries were organized and stopping on No. 2,121. “I am a former U.S. Marine who did two tours to Iraq. And I want out of here.”

“Beyond astonished,” Calabrese said, scrolling through more.

There were emails from a molecular biologist, a University of Oregon professor, a granite construction worker, a contractor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a woman who said her home town was “Unfortunately, Alabama.” There were declarations and confessions about incomes, sexual orientations, goals for their children. Several included résumés. “I am so sick of what has happened to my beautiful country,” one letter began.

“I desperately want to move my daughters to the safety and sanity of Canada,” email No. 3,248 read. “It doesn’t even really matter if Donald Trump wins. He has exposed the awful attitude that plagues the US.”

“This is no longer the America I have loved for all my life,” email No. 3,310 read. “I am a hardworking man and could contribute much to any country that gives me a chance.”

It was somewhere around email 4,230 that Trump was elected president of the United States, and just before his inauguration came email No. 4,635.

“Looking to immigrate to Cape Breton area from Colorado,” it began. “I am a skilled paralegal and my wife is an attorney.”

Calabrese read it, wondered briefly about the people who sent it, and waited for the next one to come in.

“What do people see on the horizon to be this afraid?” he said.

Maybe they don’t want to find out after it’s too late.

3 barks and woofs on “Want To Get Away From It All?

  1. That’s it? What’s the follow-up? Did any of them get there and establish residency? Is the island sinking into the Atlantic with the weight of all those new Canadians? Is CBI now another powerful force in Canadian politics? We need more, MB.

      • Thanks . . . should have done this before. Somehow we’re sheltered from the worst of it as long as we make a rule to turn off the TV as soon as the Trump coverage starts. I’d go to Canada too if I’d been exposed to the craziness of the people who still think the man will follow through on his off the cuff promises. Too sad for words.

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