People sometimes joke about leaving the country during the election, but Shane and John actually did it.
John describes the night of the election,
“We cried, and we held each other, and we looked at each other, and we said, ‘I guess we’re going to Germany.’”
Emigration and persecution were very present concepts for John and Shane growing up. John is the son of Mexican immigrants and Shane, who is Jewish, is alive today because in 1938 his Grandfather had the prescience to flee Germany for America. As Shane puts it,
“It’s poetic irony that almost 80 years later my family is leaving the United States to return to Germany.”
We also talked about the privilege inherent in this story – not everyone can get up and leave when they want to – and we discussed raising a child in a different country and how different cultures treat their children. And we discussed when you “run” vs. when you stay and fight:
“Shane and I talked about it, and if we didn’t have a kid we wouldn’t have made this move. We have a responsibility to this child to give him every opportunity possible. To be healthy, to be stable, to be safe. I do not see that future for our son in America.”
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