Dear Friends,
We arrived here on January 1, two weeks ago tomorrow. We were delayed 3 hours leaving Minneapolis, arrived in Amsterdam 3.5 hours late, missed our connection and arrived in Nice 5 hours late. But we arrived and were happy for it. We were both sick when we left Minneapolis and are just now starting to cough less. We hope to be at full strength soon.
It has been colder than usual here, but in the last few days the weather has significantly improved. Today the skies are a beautiful blue, there is a slight breeze, the temperature is officially 58 degrees, but with the warm sun it feels warmer.
Nevertheless, we are heartsick about what is taking place in the US and particularly in our home of Minneapolis. We feel detached from the reality that our children, grandchildren and other family and friends are experiencing. We don't want to be there, but feel that we should be.
The conversations that we have had recently with strangers reflects the broad range of views of what is happening. The other evening we had a discussion with a Brit who lives in France now that was very difficult for us. We did not know him. He was clearly anti-immigrant regardless of where they were migrating from and where they were migrating to. He claimed that England had become "Muslimized". We were not sure what that meant, but it was clear that he felt that Muslims who had immigrated to England were ruining the country. He may have missed the irony that he was an immigrant as well having immigrated from England to France. But privileged white men often miss the irony of their positions. Of course, he was clear that immigrants were destroying the US, a feeling that I am sure the native Americans would agree with now as they did over four centuries ago.
Our conversation with strangers yesterday was entirely different. We were having lunch at one of our favorite casual restaurants in Nice. The owner is Palestinian and very familiar with the United States. This is the last week for his restaurant and olive oil selling business. The US tariffs have had a huge negative impact on his business, and he is of the age where he certainly deserves to retire. Most, if not all the people in the restaurant were long-term customers like us and were sad to see the end of this restaurant and olive oil store.
We and two other tables were leaving all at the same time and all wanted photos with the owner and the chef. One family was from France. They spoke beautiful French but also perfect unaccented English. The other table was a couple from Switzerland whose French was passable, like ours, and whose English was good. I suspect that German was their native tongue. While the languages were varied, the sentiment was the same - Trump is destroying the world. In a conversation full of English and French, we each enumerated our complaints about Trump. The others were all very sympathetic when they learned that we were from Minneapolis. It seems that most everybody here now has heard of Minneapolis and Minnesota. The Swiss woman was really upset that Trump was heading to Davos. We asked her to please keep him in Switzerland. She did not want him.
The Côte d'Azur is a very conservative part of France. While most of the expats and non-French people we know who visit here for several months a year are liberal, there are also those with whom we will never agree. When your world view is based on us v. them, black v. white, immigrant v. native, etc. compared with we are all human beings, it seems impossible to find any significant common ground.
Thank you for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal
