WHY I'M LEAVING THE U.S....and Moving to Panama

by Gary Stamper

I’ve been writing about going to Panama for three or four months, now, but I've been dreaming about it longer than that. I’ve had several people who have asked “why Panama?”, but up until the last couple of weeks, no one has asked me why I’m leaving the U.S.

It's a great question!

It was my daughter Tanya who asked “why” a couple weeks ago.

I’ve been writing about collapse, climate change, broken systems, and political corruption in the U.S. and the world for a lot longer than the last few months, and well before the creation of this blog in early 2006. I’ve regularly attempted to call attention to the various aspects of collapse and how we can change ourselves, our communities, and the planet.

In the early days, this blog was consistently a journey of self-exploration,  primarily diving into the mind-expanding intricacies of Integral Theory and the developmental psychologies of Spiral Dynamics and later applied these concepts to my teaching and real-world events surrounding and fleshing them out.

In 2008 I wrote an article on this blog called “The S***'s Already Hit the Fan: Here Comes the Shift,” that said that we were entering a shift in thinking because of all the things that were happening – things like the collapse of the financial markets – and that the cognitive dissonance it created would force us into new ways of thinking, and that people would rise up and demand change.

I was wrong.

Around 2011, I began to talk about collapse in present tense even more as I began realizing we had passed the tipping point of climate change where nothing we could do was going to fix and reverse apocalyptic climate change and I could see that all systems - economic, government, and society, and climate - were breaking down as a result of what we had unleashed.

I also addressed these issues in my 2012 book, “Awakening the New Masculine: The Path of the Integral Warrior,” written to assist men in transitioning from the Mythopoetic to the Transpersonal level of development.

Later the same year, I penned an article called “There’s Something Seriously Wrong With Men In America,” which asked “Why haven’t we come to terms with the crisis of modern male immaturity or toxic masculinity?

In 2016, I created a massive website and forum called “Collapsing into Consciousness,” that covered every aspect of collapse I could think of. Much of it was based on my efforts around creating systems that would help me and my family and anyone else who could hear my message get through what was coming and is now happening.  We even tried to create and put into place the kind of local community, economy, food systems that we’ll need once the larger systems collapsed as they are now doing. I misjudged how many were interested and after three years of work, finally closed the website down.

For whatever reason, people just have not believed how bad it’s going to get as these systems continue to break down en masse. We’re getting a taste of it now as Covid-19 reveals how bad things are, as already broken systems have been further stressed and exposed, and we’re only now beginning to get a glimpse of how much worse it’s going to get.

Still, we remain in denial.

The U.S. has become a failed state, collapsing faster and faster into a third-world country where the only difference I see between the two candidates is how fast the collapse happens. One candidate is bad, and the other is very, very bad. I'll vote for the lesser because slow collapse is better than sudden collapse.

I’ve tried to warn others about the consequences of ignoring the problems we face, and some listened… most didn’t,  and,  as bad as 2020 has been, now things are - as I point out above -  about to get a lot worse.

A few days ago on September 10, 2020, Chris Hedges posted an article on Salon called “American Bloodlands: In a deeply polarized nation, mass violence is not far away.” Here’s a quote from the article:

“The tinder that could soon ignite widespread violent conflagrations throughout the United States lies ominously stacked around us. Millions of disenfranchised white Americans, who see no way out of their economic and social misery, struggling with an emotional void, are seething with rage against a corrupt ruling class and bankrupt liberal elite that presides over political stagnation and grotesque, mounting social inequality. Millions more alienated young men and women, also locked out of the economy and with no realistic prospect for advancement or integration, gripped by the same emotional void, have harnessed their fury in the name of tearing down the governing structures and anti-fascism. The enraged, polarized segments of the population are rapidly consolidating as the political center disintegrates. They stand poised to tear apart The United States, awash in military-grade weapons, unable to cope with the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, cursed with militarized police forces that function as internal armies of occupation and de facto allies of the neofascists.”

Mind you, this is all happening amid a pandemic that is closing in on 200,000 U.S. deaths, while our connected economies collapse because of our greed,  ignorance, and incompetence, while wildfires rage out of control in much of the west due to climate change denial and our unwillingness to accept responsibility for modern civilization’s mismanagement of the qualities needed on this planet to sustain human life.

Last, as all this is unfolding before us as I’ve been predicting since 2006 when I “woke up’ to these possibilities amid scorn that ranged from being called a fear monger, to hearing “science will fix this” to “the aliens will rescue us” to “God won’t allow this to happen,” to the spiritual-bypassing of The Secret which claims we create our own reality,  it come down to we’ve never actually taken responsibility and the Sixth Great Extinction and the end of the “Anthropocene” is upon us.

A very real possibility is that while all of the above is happening, it will be impossible to properly decommission – it takes up to 10 years to deactivate one properly - the 400+ nuclear reactors on our planet, and that their meltdowns will result in our final demise even earlier.

Back to the question posed by my daughter at the beginning of this article: “Why am I leaving the United States?” which begs the question, why aren’t you? Millions of Americans are leaving. Ex-pats who may or may not give up citizenship, with the wealthy ones buying (fast!) or earning (takes a lot longer) a second citizenship which gives them a second passport and more freedom.

The government recognized this was happening years ago and put limits on how much people could take out of the country

For me, I don’t want to stay and watch this country as it descends further into chaos and civil war and the ensuing suffering, starvation, and destruction it will cause.  Again, the U.S. is a failed state and I’m as much to blame as anyone, growing up in White Privilege, and not “waking up” until my mid-fifties. I’ve tried and failed to set up conscious communities to….what? Put off the inevitable death from the Sixth Great Extinction?  We all die, and I feel immensely fortunate that I’ve never had to go to war or kill another human being and I don’t want to start now.

I’m leaving because I’m lucky and can and there’s nothing more I can do here. If you’re one of the very few people who will likely read this rant, I invite you to join me. Maybe not in Panama, because while the white sand and turquoise waters of Panama’s Little-Known Caribbean Gem Bocas Del Toro call to me, they may not call you, but If you can, get out. I hear Ecuador's nice and cheap!

Photos of Bocas Del Toro

I’m leaving because I still believe in possibilities, just not here.

I’m leaving because, even if there were better circumstances here, I can experience a better standard of living there than I can here.

I’m leaving because I’m 75 years old, in great health, I’ve had an amazing life, and I want to experience one last great adventure before I die.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the Caribbean and have always wanted to live there. Panama has a healthy economy, a stable government, no army, low taxes and no hurricanes or fires and is rated the number one retirement location in the world two years running according to International Living Magazine. Panama offers several generous Visa Programs to help ex-pats from all over the world make the move even more worthwhile.

Panama is scheduled to completely reopen to tourism and air travel by October 12^th, and if that happens – I’m also prepared if they have the same results we’ve had while trying to reopen - I won’t be far behind. Friends and family? Come visit me in my Caribbean paradise!

I'll still be as close as social media and I'll probably still be ranting about injustice and corrupt politicians in the U.S. as I'm also writing about my move and my adventures which started with my Great American Pandemic Road trip.

I'll send you a digital postcard.