Canadians have always had a love-hate relationship with the USA; for obvious reasons, the hate side is stronger right at the moment. The US government is doing everything it can to make the country hateable – and harder to live in. When lawful permanent residents are detained without trial for exercising their free speech, this becomes a scary place indeed. So it’s quite understandable that many of those who can leave the US for Canada are planning on doing so – like the philosopher Jason Stanley making a high-profile announcement that he’s leaving Yale for Toronto.

It’s tempting to try to do something similar myself. But I’m not going to. And I want to talk about why.

I first came to the US in 1998, for graduate school. I met my wife in my final year at Harvard, and she has spent almost her whole life in the Boston area, in New England; her friends and family are here. So once I was done the faculty job search and able to choose where I lived, I chose to stay in metropolitan Boston to be with her, and with them. It was never my plan to stay in New England when I arrived here, but that’s how things ended up. As a result, I’ve now lived in metro Boston alone for longer than the amount of time I lived and grew up in Canada.

And over the quarter century I’ve been here, I’ve built up a larger and deeper network of friendships than I have anywhere else. Before I came out publicly about being gender-fluid, I mentioned it to a friend in North Carolina, who asked how many other people know about it. I told her that I’d talked about my gender fluidity on a birthday party announcement for local friends, so everybody who was on the announcement knew – and that was about 150 people. She expressed astonishment that anyone could know that many people to invite – but between my wife’s existing friendships, my academic friendships, the connections I’ve made through LARPing, and more, that’s the circle of local friends I’ve accumulated. I don’t see most of them very often; a typical party with that invite list will have about 30-40 people actually showing up. But that’s the number of people around here that I know.

The importance of having such a large circle isn’t just about feeling popular. Over a half century ago, the sociologist Mark Granovetter rightly pointed to what he called the strength of weak ties: even when one doesn’t have emotionally intimate connections with them or spend much time with them, just the fact of knowing and recognizing many friends and neighbours allows for easier community organizing and more life opportunities. A very large number of people have pitched in to help my wife deal with her cancer, and we in turn have supported others in the community with medical expenses and in other emergencies. Many in the LARP community rightly compare it to a church, in the way it helps people know each other and offer support in hard times. Alasdair MacIntyre in Dependent Rational Animals points out that the most important thing about such communities is not agreement or shared values, but these very material forms of support that they provide each other.

But the ties I’ve formed here go deeper too. These friendships are integral to my wife’s life, especially through the music she plays with her multiple bands. She’s been afraid enough of the régime that she’s been the one coming up with plans for an escape to Canada – but such an escape would mean leaving behind her whole life, including her whole family as well as the friends. A good human life requires shared projects, shared in a community, and many of these projects require that community to be local. As for me, that list of friends includes people I share many intimate things with. There are a few geographically scattered friends to whom I am at least as close as the people here – but there is no more than one of them in any given place. Here, the list of close friends is long too. If things got worse we could run and leave them all behind to start a new life elsewhere – but at that point, we would need to ask the question, what would we be living for?

For crucially, nearly all these people are Americans, and most are only Americans. They’re as afraid and upset as anyone in the country, but they don’t have an escape route. I suspect that if you could wave a magic wand and make it possible for them to all uproot as a group and bring their friends to Toronto, they would happily take that option and prefer it to staying here. But they don’t have that option, and there is no way to get it, and so it doesn’t matter. The group is here, and they’re going to stay here. If I’m going to stay with them, then I need to stay here too.

I am not here because I love the place. If I were to list the best countries in the world to live in in the abstract, the US definitely wouldn’t top the list; it might not even crack the top 20. For that matter, New England is not even my favourite part of the United States; I find the culture boring and the food bland compared to somewhere like Texas (where I’ve also lived), and the weather is depressing: long, cold, dark winters where the snow usually doesn’t come until after the Christmas season when it would be exciting to have. But I am here for the people, not the place. Because of them, I’m staying in New England, where I’ve been for decades; I expect to die here. That makes me a New Englander – and complaining endlessly about New England, especially the weather, is itself exactly the sort of thing that New Englanders characteristically do.

Thus my patience for American exceptionalism and Constitution-based nationalism wears ever thinner. I agree with J.D. Vance that the US is “a group of people with a shared history and a common future” – a history, and a future, that I have joined. And it is for that reason that I want to fight and protect this place from people like Vance who are doing a disastrous job at governing this place even by their own standards. When a student is illegally abducted for exercising her free speech in my town, in Somerville, Massachusetts, it’s time for me to take action.

I am an American. I am a New Englander. These are my people, this is my place, and I intend to stay and defend it.

EDIT (8 Apr 2025): The above link on “illegally abducted” above went to the wrong place; it has now been fixed. Thanks to my wife for catching that.