You're probably not moving to Canada

Kurt Cobain, Astronautalis (a song about generational disillusionment)

Table of Contents

• You’re probably not going to leave the country

• Memories of 1992: Rodney King and an Uneasy Déjà V …

• The infamous red line

You’re probably not going to leave the country

Shortly after the 2016 election, Google searches for “how to move to Canada” spiked to unheard-of levels. Most people didn’t actually relocate their families, of course; in time, we acclimated to the new political environment. We did not move.

A former coworker of mine who lived in California actually followed through. She began the lengthy process of applying for visas, arranging new work, and cutting the social and financial ties that keep us tethered to citizenship. Eighteen months later, their family moved to Vancouver.

It wasn’t fast, easy, or inexpensive, and it’s not an option for most people.

Leaving your birth nation to legally emigrate elsewhere requires one of two things to be true:

• You have skills or family that make you eligible; or

• You have enough money to buy your way in.

There is a third pathway, motivated by survival or threat or coercion. (These stories involve risks much greater than any legal concerns.) Undocumented migration creates all sorts of ripple effects, of course, and they're both good and bad. What we’re witnessing right now in the Los Angeles protests (and the federal military response) is a dramatic case of one of those ripples.

Memories of 1992: Rodney King and an Uneasy Déjà Vu

In the spring of 1992, Los Angeles went up in flames. I remember watching from my college dorm as the TV showed neighborhoods burning after four LAPD officers were acquitted in the brutal beating of Rodney King. Over six days of unrest, more than 60 people lost their lives and thousands were injured. It ultimately took over 10,000 National Guard troops and federal soldiers to restore order. For an 18-year-old witnessing it from afar, the coverage felt surreal and frightening—we had just finished watching the Gulf War as similar American troops liberated Kuwait and invaded Iraq.

I try to remember what those moments felt like as a young not-quite-adult, and what today’s moments might feel like to others. I grew up in a post-Vietnam America, where the only enemy was the Soviet Union and American military excursions were sporadic but decisive. An 18-year-old today, by comparison, only has political memories of Obama, Trump and Biden. Their largest military stories have been ISIS and Afghanistan, Gaza and Israel, Russia and Ukraine.

Today’s ongoing protests (and the promise of expanding protests) has echoes of Rodney King: anger at injustice, streets filled with smoke and fury, and Americans nervously asking, “Is this the moment where things break?”

When you watch thousands of protestors exchanging (non-lethal) fire with law enforcement and your own military, it’s dissociative. It’s external to you, a tragedy or a crime or (if you’re our current President) an insurrection. But unless you’re directly involved, it’s easy to say “it’s not my fault.”

As a college student, thousands of miles away from riots in a city I’d never been to, Rodney King was an emotional milestone. The same is happening right now, if we allow ourselves and our children to look.

The infamous red line

In full transparency, I’ve had more than a few conversations lately with people trying to define their own red line¹ —the moment they’d stop tolerating what’s happening in America. You don’t have to look very hard to find essays comparing America 2025 to Germany 1933, or to other modern democracies that slipped (or crashed) into something more autocratic. In times of great uncertainty, social norms become brittle. Nobody wants to believe the impossible is happening, but also nobody wants to be stuck on the wrong side of things in the face of violent politics.

And so, we fret.

Everyone’s circumstances are different, and everyone has their own risk tolerances. A present-day first-generation immigrant family has much more at risk today than my own, even though the only thing separating our stories is perhaps 100 years of ancestral residency. So the question becomes: what is my responsibility to my family, my community, my country, my world? How do you decide when an action becomes a crisis, a crisis an emergency, an emergency a personal response?

When you read a list like this, it sounds ridiculous. And in some of my whispered conversations, I’ve heard plenty of people cite one of these violations as a red line. A thing that should demand response.

If reading this list gives you a chill, you’re not alone. Most of us aren’t prepared to face all of it. But even recognizing that these scenarios are thinkable is a form of civic clarity. A red line isn’t just a theory; it’s a commitment. If we know what we will do when it’s crossed, we’re less likely to freeze or flail. Some of us might protest. Some will donate. Some will organize quietly, or run for office, or simply stand up for someone more vulnerable. You don’t need to do everything, but you need to do something.

That’s how democracies survive.

Write your list. Share it with someone you trust. Print it out and tape it to the door, if you want. But make it real. So when your red line is crossed—not if, but when—you’re not asking “what do I do?” You’ll already know. That’s the whole point.

1  For our purposes, we’re using “red line” as a metaphor for a limit or boundary set by a person or nation, beyond which there will be serious consequences. Ideally, those consequences are public and explicit and decisive.