RT @atossaaraxia I’ve spent far too many Friday nights angry this month. – That’s “far” too many!
— U.S. Citizen Abroad (@USCitizenAbroad) March 23, 2013
The following comment by Calgary deserves to be a post.
… and someone needs to write a book on the “human” side of this, the collateral damage, especially for families like yours, Animal. And yours, monalisa.
If only others really, really understood, we could (or I could) leave the anger behind and live my remaining years without the nagging worry in the back of my mind that my son’s situation (and me as the trustee of his finances) will be “caught” / that I am / we are criminals.
I don’t have the worry of having to visit aging, ailing parents across the line. Mine are both gone — and in many ways (as awful as that sounds), I am glad for that fact. I hate the burden on my one sister who understands all this by my unrelenting discussion to her of me, her Canadian sister, and family’s US citizenship-based taxation issues. It is a maze and we are blindfolded and we don’t have a step-by-step best procedure that will work.
PS — I am one who would be most hesitant to again cross the US border with my Canadian passport and CLN, especially if my son were travelling with me. That he would be safer to cross the US border with his Canadian passport that shows his Canadian birthplace with someone else rather than with his mother who has a Canadian passport with a US birthplace makes me sick to my stomach. But that’s my perception — I would not feel safe in doing that with him and some nice border guard asking if I was his mother, then putting two and two together.
I’m so glad both of you — and I wish so many others — were tuned in to Isaac Brock. And, I’m so glad it’s here for me and my unresolvable anger.
For many the anger is worse than the tax issues. Somehow or other, one must learn to put the anger behind you. Sometime ago I wrote a post on this called: “Psychotherapy for U.S. citizens abroad“. Excerpts include:
Moe Levine (not that I ever met him) was considered to be one of America’s greatest trial lawyers. Although he died in 1974, his wisdom lives on his book (appropriate called) “Moe Levine on Trial Advocacy“. He (legend has it) was a master at delivering the closing statement in his jury trials. When arguing for a severely injured plaintiff he (according to the commentators of his time) would tell the jury (referring to a badly injured client):
“It’s not what you take from them it’s what you leave them with.”
In other words, the inability to live a normal life was worse than the injury itself. Leaving aside the financial costs, Obama/IRS tyranny has had a very serious effect on the lives of many U.S. expats. Few of them will ever forget the day they learned about these problems. One (of many) example is the story of Ambassador Jacobson’s 70 Year old grandmas” in Saskatchewan. (For an update to this see this comment.)
Suggestions for how to resolve and move beyond the anger …
How has this experience changed you as a person?
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“The more ex-pats who go through with renunciation/relinquishment, the louder the message will be heard.”
That was 3 years ago, which makes my revival doubtful, but still…
The more ex-pats who go through with renunciation/relinquishment, the louder the message remains unheard by deaf homelanders and ostriches.
‘Not long after he [Bellamy] penned the pledge of allegiance, he made these frightening statements in an editorial for the Illustrated American:
“A democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world…Where all classes of society merge insensibly into one another every alien immigrant of inferior race may bring corruption to the stock. There are races more or less akin to our own whom we may admit freely and get nothing but advantage by the infusion of their wholesome blood. But there are other races, which we cannot assimilate without lowering our racial standard, which we should be as sacred to us as the sanctity of our homes.”‘
That makes it so much more interesting that the pledge of allegiance was recited in schools in a US outlying possession, by citizens of that outlying possession who had been born as US non-citizen nationals but had been converted into aliens by act of Congress because of the inferiority of their race, but by act of Congress still owed allegiance to the country of which they were aliens.
Norman,
Thanks for bringing this post forward. It’s interesting that the person I was then has not effectively moved on with my anger.
Thanks also for your comment regarding *The Pledge of Allegiance* that most of us here had ingrained in our psyche. It is scary to me that the US mantra remains the same as the author of *The Pledge*…
(There is another post in the Isaac Brock archives that discusses *The Pledge*. One interpretation to me is that very US exceptionality is why we who have left, for whatever reason, are shunned and now exploited.)
This all fits in so well with this morning’s comment by MuzzledNoMore (though it goes much further than the tax arena) in reply to Tom Alciere and George’s comment after …
Hmm. America’s “leadership” in the tax arena has made the world a much more dangerous place for her expats. Not sure I’m ready for much more American “leadership”.
and to Patricia’s new post, It’s NOT the Taxes, it’s the Effect on Real Lives, Stupid.