Have you seen the state of gerrymandering in Texas? They know their positions are unpopular abominations against democracy, so they’ve worked furtively to dismantle democracy so they can get away with this shit.

Yes, for the love of humanity, VOTE. But never believe that’s all you can or must do. We outnumber them, and they need to be reminded of that in more ways than one.

Okay, and? That doesn’t change a thing braxy said. What if you’ve been aware for years of the pot getting hotter and hotter and have had every desire to leave but don’t have the ability to? Those that have left were in a position in which they had the means to do so. Those that want to but can’t for any number of reasons (finances, family, health, etc. etc.) don’t have much choice.

What about the child rape victims who have zero agency? What about the disabled who are completely reliant on others? What about people who have court orders barring them from leaving for whatever reason? What about those for whom leaving would mean abandoning their children to an abusive spouse who has custody?

I could name reasons that’s not feasible for many, many people, but the bottom line is that may work for privileged people, but our responsibility is to care for all of us, and saying ‘sucks to be you’ is not a solution any of us should accept.

Translation. “I ate, world hunger solved”.

This is akin to saying that you should abandon a dog or child when they’re bleeding immensely. If I can take care of myself, I can take care of people who need me, family or not.

Fund their moves or shut the fuck up

“It is impossible for me to leave”

“ThEn YoU ShOuLd LeAvE!”

Are you illiterate?

If it was easy enough for a significant amount of people to leave, the Republicans would love it because they could force out almost everyone that wouldn’t vote for them

I have zero faith in republicans realizing any facts.

we’re fairly well off but my wifes job is at a university, how do I move several campuses, the student body and the rest of the staff with us?

No, the Puritans were well-funded twats. Also, Texas isn’t America, I suppose everyone refers to France as Europe?

What will happen is the few that can’t afford to leave Texas will remain in an oppressive state run by psychopaths with no chance to free themselves. Those that can stay and fight, probably should, but it’s also a huge ask to have people just trying to survive day-to-day also have to fight their shitty government back into the hell-hole from whence it came. They also have to deal with their own Texas neighbors who are too dumb to understand how repressed they are and actually like the direction that state is heading, as their own rights and freedoms are stripped away from underneath them.

It turns out that moving costs money, the cost of living varies greatly in surrounding states, Texas is huge, and with more than 60% of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, the incidental expenses that pop up from a move would be too great for more than 60% of Americans. That’s even if they could find a job on the receiving end.

You clearly don’t know the challenges of leaving a country and moving to e.g. the EU or Australia or something, or any other country for that matter. Countries are extremely selective of who they want in, they likely won’t accept someone unless they work in a specialization that the country is in a shortage of and is in demand. Most of the world has laws that you can’t accept someone for work in a country unless you can prove that they can’t find a citizen of the country to fill the position first, and afterwards they have to sponsor a work visa for you which is a lot of time, money, and paperwork for the company, so they often avoid it. It’s also a lot of time, money, and paperwork for you.

You can also work as a digital nomad provided you have enough money saved up and can sustain yourself on self-employment (you’re not allowed to work under an employer on these visas), but generally this requires moving between different countries a lot because this is not a path to permanent residency. Some countries have treaties with the US that have a similar, but more lenient, process, for example the DAFT for the Netherlands which basically allows self-employed entrepeneurs to reside in the Netherlands as long as you can sustain yourself the entire time without government aid, and have a spare ~€4500 in a Dutch bank account that you can’t withdraw from at all times.

The other option is trying to get residence or citizenship by descent if you have a parent within 1-4 generations and meet certain criteria depending on what the citizenship laws of the country are – I’m in the process of trying to do this with an adoptive Slovak/Hungarian great-grandparent and adoptive German great-grandparent right now, and I can verify myself that this is also an extremely expensive and time-consuming process that I’m not sure if I can even afford to continue in the future, and the worst part is I don’t even know if it will pay off because my situation is a little fuzzy and possibly doesn’t count. If that doesn’t work, I’m absolutely out of luck for moving out of the US; I’ve tracked down a majority of my biological ancestors in the past 3 centuries and none of them in the past 200 years are from outside of the US. My ancestry for basically until you get to around the 1500s or 1600s is entirely American, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, German, Dutch, Belgian, and French, which I’m pretty sure qualifies me for the most white Anglo-Saxon American here.

There’s one other viable choice too – attending university at another country. The problem is there are a lot of criteria you have to meet to be elligible for this in the first place (for one you have to be very young, they usually won’t accept people who are past their 20s), often times American diplomas and 2-year degrees aren’t seen as qualifying you for college outside of the US (in Germany they have the “Abitur” as a requirement for university instead of a diploma, which is somewhat more rigorous than an Associate’s degree, and the only way they accept your high school education as enough is if you gained specific credits and pass a few AP tests while in high school, and they don’t count doing those credits in college it HAS to be while you’re in high school), it’s highly competitive, universities are required to only accept foreigners after they’ve accepted all applicants who are citizens; and it can be incredibly expensive unless you’re going to a country which has no tuition costs and cheap student housing, which less and less countries are doing (Norway recently closed off free tuition for new non-European applicants).

The last options available aren’t viable for a majority of people, but I’ll list them out anyway. For one, you can spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on property in some countries in exchange for a residence visa, a la Spain, Portugal, Cyprus’ Golden Visa programs.

Otherwise, if you can’t afford that (most people trying to escape the US or poorer countries can’t), you can go through literal hell and join the French Foreign Legion at a chance to ask for citizenship of France after a few years – but this is a TERRIBLE decision for anyone to make, the FFL isn’t just a group of soldiers, their entire training is basically abusing you with the worst conditions they can in order to weed out those who aren’t extremely tough, and the soldiers are put in the most intense, mind-and-body breaking deployments imaginable. It is scary and most people aren’t built for it psychologically nor physically. Plus you’re not even guaranteed citizenship, even after serving the 3-year period a lot of people are denied it.

TL;DR, the ability to move out of a country/free-travel-area is relatively exclusive and inaccessible to most people, and only gets less realistic as time goes on due to both age and growing anti-immigrant sentiment in many countries. If you’re part of a group subject to a country’s systematic social & economic issues (i.e. not already in a privileged/well-off position where you can already afford to fund your education or have got the education to work in a highly wanted specialization), it’s practically impossible to migrate to one of the countries that you’ll have more opportunities in, even if you are part of the potential third of Americans who might qualify for citizenship by descent. It’s the reason so many people risk their lives and freedom to illegally cross the border into the US and Europe every year, in a place where the system is against you it’s unlikely most people have access to the means to legally move away.

Come on, don’t be disingenuous, you need more than a bus ticket if you don’t live close to the border of a state that allows abortions.

Your whole trip will most likely take three days or more (getting there, getting the procedure, coming back), so you need at least two days in a hotel/Airbnb. You will have to get off work for those days as well, that is cost as well.

That could be around 300$ together if you don’t have any vacation/sick days, on top of the cost of the procedure itself. And it’s not like you can save up that money over several weeks/months either, when you need an abortion every day counts. Contrary to some media, those affected don’t want to wait until the last possible day.

Some people really only have money for the bare necessities. And they are the ones who really should have access to an abortion because a baby wouldn’t improve their situation in the slightest.

Being poor isn’t a choice in most cases. Learned helplessness might play a role, but telling them “just get a bus ticket, lul” won’t change that.

So, like, surely you realize people need homes and jobs and stuff right? You can’t just hop on the next bus to freedom town and hope for the best, that’s a child’s view of emigration.

Bus ticket, abortion cost, food and lodging for the duration, lost wages for the time it has taken. Also what if this is a mother already? Childcare costs while you are gone.

I am sure I have missed a lot as well.

You need to drastically work on your empathy my friend.