Deported

/ Jeff Cann

2026

When they told me I had to leave the country, it felt like complete nonsense. Jeanette and I discussed emigrating at least a dozen times over the past eight years, hoping to bail on our shifting society. We identified countries that might work—the English speakers: Canada of course. Australia. New Zealand sounds appealing. I know my kids would move there with us. But would these countries take us in? What would we do for work? Could we find a home? Could we afford one? Qualify for national healthcare? So many questions. We never got past the scheming.

The notice came registered mail, I guess to record that I received it. Just a green notice stuck on the front door: Registered mail at the post office, fifteen days to pick it up. I envisioned a bequest—it’s all yours if you spend one night in the haunted castle. The post office is only open while I’m at work. Well Saturday morning too. I had to skip the last hour of my bike ride to get in before they closed. I’ve dealt with this before. Last time I bought a laptop, the mail carrier wouldn’t leave it on my porch. That was a Monday. I limped along with my ailing laptop for five more days. I was pretty pissed I cut my ride short for this crap.

When he said he was running on a love-it-or-leave-it-platform, I rolled my eyes. We’ve been hearing this garbage for decades. Most recently when Colin Kaepernick and then other athletes took a knee during the anthem. Before that during the hippie rebellion of the late-sixties. Deportation, such an unbelievable threat. Besides, who decides who is patriotic? Dissent is as American as, well, Paul Revere. Where would we be without protest? Colonial Rule? Slavery? No Votes for Women? Uncivil Rights?

George Floyd was the turning point. At first the nation came together. Unacceptable, we all screamed. I never imagined such unity. Just as quickly, the tide turned. Some people took the protests personally, as if it was all directed at them. Perhaps it was. The concept that Black lives matter inexplicably offends people. Half of the white population doesn’t think systemic racism exists. That downtown rally I went to was the only time someone holding a gun threatened me. Tentacles reached out: parental rights, anti-gay/anti-trans backlash, doubling down on a Christian nation. A culture war settled in. It’s been us against them ever since.

Homeland Security sent the letter. My “anti-American writings prove I’m a danger to the country.” My citizenship is revoked. I’m illegal—that’s the word they used in the letter. I contend I’m not anti-American, I’m anti-president. This president. They gave me two months to clear out.

For now, it’s Canada. They just announced provisional visas for deported US citizens. I think we’re fortunate to be among the first wave of refugees. Eventually, Canada will close its southern border. Ha. The irony. I guess it serves us right.

~ ~ ~

This thought experiment popped into my head after being assigned the writer’s prompt: it felt like complete nonsense… last week. I find it hard not to imagine a lingering dystopia just beyond the horizon. I’m hopeful this remains fiction.

Related content:

Fellow blogger, Sally Edelstein, is offering original merchandise featuring this awesome graphic. I considered buying a coffee mug, but then I realized Donald Trump would be the first thing I saw every morning. Still, I love the image, check out her merch:  Kamala Hope Hate Heal Grow by Sally Edelstein (pixels.com)      

Also, rock-out with this brilliant parody of ABBA’s Dancing Queen by the Partridge Family-esque musical group The Marsh Family:

Photo by NEOSiAM on Pexels

GO KAMALA!

34 thoughts on “Deported”

  1. This is a very skillful blend of reality and possibility, Jeff.
    re Kamala, my sister from suburban Melbourne AU told me this story.
    As she approached a school crossing that she normally uses to return home after a morning walk, she recognised a neighbour. As they approached the crossing, the Lollipop Lady (school crossing superintendent) lifted both hands with fingers crossed and called out ‘Go Kamala’. Both my sister and the normally aloof neighbour instinctively raised crossed fingers and rejoined, ‘With luck’. So at least the Outlander vote seems secure.

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  2. Goodness, this is prescient stuff, Jeff, and all too plausible, too. I’ve wondered what might become of me in such a situation, with my disabled status and dependency on social safety net programs just to survive. I don’t think I’d be able to relocate anywhere. Your dystopian tale could very well become the reality for millions of us here in the States. This is also incredibly well written and startlingly convincing. All that’s missing is the Rod Serling intro…

    Go, Kamala, indeed!

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    • I remember reading the Handmaids Tale when it first came out, and I thought “great story, complete fiction”. Yet we are marching towards a society resembling that every year. The Hitler comparisons are just too accurate. Marginalized communities are at risk and dissenting voices are in danger. Some twilight zone music playing in the stratosphere would be an appropriate addition to this mess.

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  5. I had a nightmare on the day Biden stepped down that the government was lining up all of the women who were no longer of child bearing age or otherwise without children or barren, and systematically executing them. Younger women were tethered in cages and being used like dairy cattle for infants whose mothers died in childbirth. It’s all very real if somehow that excrement gets into power again. My backpack is at the ready in case I need to haul ass.

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  9. what did you think about Kamala’s choice for VP?

    oh, and i had a tooth question for you– i had to get an upper molar extracted about a month ago, and will be getting a flipper tooth. not exactly vanity related, but more to make sure my teeth don’t shift too drastically while waiting for a more permanent replacement. aren’t you afraid your teeth will shift without getting a “place holder”/flipper tooth??

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    • The limited info I’ve read about Walz makes it seem like he a pretty upstanding guy and fairly hard to bash, which I think is great. I think it’s interesting how Trump is painting Harris and Walz as radical liberals, because I consider them moderate progressives at most. A funny facebook quote I read yesterday was that Walz was the only DEI candidate in the race, chosen purely for his identity as a middle aged, white midwesterner.

      I hadn’t even considered that my teeth might move, and the dentist never mentioned it. Honestly, my teeth are so ugly, it hardly even matters. I’m also crushing the heck out of them recently since I’ve been off tourette meds. I need to come up with some sort of long term tooth solution because what I’m doing right now isn’t sustainable.

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      • re: Walz– i don’t follow much politics at all, but i thought it kind of ironic that she picked the “middle aged, white midwesterner.” 😉

        re: teeth … i’ve had braces twice (the second time was for TMJ), and i wear a mouth guard at night since i grind my teeth, so the night guard should help keep mine somewhat in-line for now. maybe you should consider a night guard? it really helps with the grinding. my insurance covered mine, and i got it from my dentist.

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    • When I wrote this, before Biden dropped-out, Trump winning the election seemed like a foregone conclusion. Now along with 150 million other americans and about a billion people around the planet, I have some hope. It’s amazing how the US has become such a global disrupter over the past decade. Harris winning won’t erase our desire to move away. Melbourne is off the list, though. I saw it ranked in the top 10 most expensive cities in the world.

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  13. Going through Reader looking for tags for my next post, I’ve seen yours here a couple of times before I read it, gazed at the ‘coffee mug’, listened to the song. I engaged. I live in an undisclosed location in the area of the international city of human unity, Auroville, an exGreen Beret, expat Amercan, exClassical Greek scholar, here 20 years now. I traveled the world a penniless vagabond for 10 years before I settled here, but with my skill set I sometimes got nice work and lived rather well, and sometimes no. Spent a lot of time, months at a time, a hermit somewhere in self-study and inner exploration. Yes, I urged the machine on on a special forces tactical nuke team and in ’83 parachuted with my team into West Germany with the bomb, not knowing until we landed if it were armed or not. It wasn’t obviously. In ’95 I did a hunger strike in Jerusalem with a Danish guy so he’d help me tape poems of mine on holy places around the old city, and I looked at them like tactical nukes. I went on alone to put them on the top of Mt. Sinai and inside and around the Great Pyramid. I’m just talking here.

    I’ve had some small town fame, a TV spot in Cuzco, Peru, made local news sometimes being a homeless pilgrim, but fame and me are a world apart. The poems were rather bad. Now I still write them and post them here and there, mostly on my blog, get published some, have a very small but loyal readership. The poems are better than before.

    Anyway, like guy, I don’t think you see the problem. It’s not Trump or any political person, although they certainly cause a lot of problems. We all do, some a lot, some not a lot. I’ve been on the outside of society enough to discover hidden things, and one of the biggest is that consciousness is not localized inside of us some imagination of a thing we live alone in; we share it among ourselves, the good and the bad. This knowledge alone would revolutionize society. Thoughts and feelings move like waves among us, disguised as or own, and we act upon that in mass, most especially hatred and ill will. A magnet picks it up and tries to kill as many people as they can in one go; a president picks it up and ruins a nation. A blogger picks it up and spreads more misunderstanding.

    There is so much more to us than the tip of the iceberg. Just the everyday of dreams, if you learn to interpret them, will knock you down with the knowledge of the future they give, of the hearts of the men and women around you, of the world unfolding before everybody’s eyes that you are beginning to see because you can interpret the representation. I’m trying to say we are likened unto cavemen still, have not come out of our caves, are still little animals vying for feeding space and a place in the sun, have not even become fully human yet, but we can understand we are still becoming and open more to that than the disappointment and fear the times give us, have always given to whomever since we began to speak and build fires huddled together in ancient times afraid more of each other than bears, tigers, and wolves. What does this mean to you and your post? I imagine it won’t mean anything more than a curiosity, but I thought I might comment anyway.

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    • This is sort of poetry in its own right. Maybe this should be your next blog post. I don’t assign the world’s ills just to Trump, but he’s sure working hard to burn up what might still work in the world. I’d love to see the outcome if we were fueled by compassion for a generation instead of fear.

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      • I’ve spent some days thinking over your response. My blog gets maybe 10 views a post, and when I have gotten off onto another blog or, recently, onto a literary magazine, my content gets the average views/likes the blog does or the magazine, and that’s that. I just can’t say the ‘problem’ right, in poetry or prose, but I want to try again with you, a man with some understanding and picking up on the ideas in the group mind; your story I’m speaking about. I’ve had that thought myself in relation to Trump in office, even though I already live outside the US. Okay, good story, and I neglected to say that pardon me.

        The revolution in thought that led to us seeing Earth as a planet in space rotating with a host of ‘dead’ planets around a star in a galaxy one of no one knows how many in a universe that seems like some finite infinity, as opposed to the religious views, not only in Europe but the world over, took too many ruined lives and deaths, many, many years to establish as the reality we all take for granted except for some who would doubt that the toilet bowl they sit on is round they are so big-headed, holdouts to themselves on the throne and not the group mind, now so divided we risk the death of us.

        No one need blast off in space or study the views in a telescope to convince themselves the Earth is so. It’s established fact, but what longterm, iffy at first, in fits and starts revolution it took to establish it, and we might even say that science had its birth there or at least cut its teeth on that struggle to know and establish. We are faced with the same now in regard to other facts of us equal in enormity to these scientific facts I’m stating now but greater, much greater, to what it means to be human and live and work together on this planet. And now science, holding the position of arbitrator of fact, as religion did of old, blocks the new incoming knowledge, not with imprisonment and death but with ridicule and obscurity, oblivion, and religion too is there with its dogma opposing fact, as always.

        I’m sorry you didn’t understand me. Of course “if we were fueled by compassion for a generation instead of fear” we would not be here today worried the American way of life is in danger of being destroyed, not just by this election, but this one plants in our disbelieving eyes and in our beating hearts the very real possibility thereof, and I am sorry to say that, fearmonger though I must sound. Compassion is a higher ideal, particular to Western countries, certainly not to India, where I live, and as that only a few of us are able to grasp it with our hands and have it guide our lives, and even those few fail quite often. I know I do, but what makes me continually pick it up and try again, indeed forces me to, is the knowledge that I have gained, know as intimately as I know my own penis and body parts, whereby we, all of humanity, including all other animals and every plant, even the denying stone and refuting earth, share our awareness of being alive with one another, notwithstanding the stone and earth’s denial of such, share identity, share the field of consciousness, which means that we communicate with one another via dream and vision every single night and day, and that thoughts and feeling move through us like waves, flinging contradiction to the four winds, hate into every heart, such is the node-gas of the human field filled with so many of us the Earth can’t contain us.

        The lifetime I have spent to gain that knowledge is not possible for the mass, but I do have results in the form of online content, particularly a podcast, The Dream Company on Buzzsprout, which shows how to crack the dream code and see that shared field of consciousness, demonstrated in the daily life of a dream group together many years, but you have to listen to more episodes than your patience and your like button would allow because it takes many, many examples for that field to come clearly into view, and when the creator of such content is unknown and with no real credentials, on an electronic communication field that doubts its OWN validity, you don’t have the ganas it takes to take that time.

        My poetry and prose, particularly when that relates my own personal experience as an adventurer in the inner and outer world, you’d find on the net if you looked, but that word anecdotal will crop up, a way science has shielded itself from new knowledge of ourselves in terms of consciousness, intentionally or not, and I’ll be laughed into the barn. But you know, America was discovered long before it was discovered, and it wasn’t discovered by the scientific method. You couldn’t repeat the results of finding it in all these other labs. You had to go there yourself or trust the anecdotal experience of those who had. When we are speaking of events or locations in consciousness, not in terms of the brain but of consciousness itself, such as the discovery of the shared field of consciousness, or even the interpretation of dream for that matter, and I will only mention here but not really include the shared identity, which takes so much more to discover than merely reviewing dream and vision, you have to have as your source the anecdotal experience of everyday people because you can’t reproduce those things in a lab by material means.

        Okay, do you see the dilemma? The problem is much bigger than politics, bigger than anything we think it is today. We need a revolution in being human that starts with greater knowledge of ourselves that is readily available in the everyday of dream, at least to start it, but how do we turn people’s eyes inside? How do I turn yours?

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