The New Zealand Herald sets the antipodean discussion off with its moaning about how [some] expatriates think the country is going to hell in a socialist handbasket. Others think they're being a little precious.
In the past clever young things like Ernest Rutherford, Katherine Mansfield and Jack Lovelock left and never really returned. Now many of them go away and come back again, and the ones that stay away can sort of keep in touch with what's happening via the magic internet.
It's just damned difficult to keep in touch with what is happening in another country, even your home country, if you're not there. Some people react by finding much fault with whence they came from, others by making it out to be some sort of sunny, happy little paradise with few problems.
There's a way in which expatriates are like lapsed Catholics, never quite acknowledging the complexity of their upbringing -- the good and the bad, and that other people might have had different experiences -- yet feeling a kind of guilt about their fall from grace or trans-oceanic journey.
Posted by robe0419 at March 18, 2005 3:57 PM