Editor’s Note: This week’s guest contributor Greg Cantori is the former executive of Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations and a long-time activist for a more just world. He writes about why he and his family have moved to Spain and their initial experience there.

For six weeks now, my family has been living in Benajarafe, a small coastal town near Málaga, where you can walk to the Mediterranean in five minutes. Every morning, I walk our nine-year-old granddaughter to school. Every afternoon, we walk home. Some Fridays, we stop for ice cream. Sometimes we detour for a quick bike ride or jump on a swing on the beach before dinner. She’s learning to ride her bicycle on these streets, and I’m not terrified watching her.

That last part keeps hitting me: the absence of fear I’d been carrying for decades without realizing it.

Spain, despite its many imperfections, has decided that people-centric infrastructure matters more than profit-taking. The United States has made different choices. Those choices show up in our bodies, minds, and nervous systems.

Every car in Spain is required by law to carry a reflective safety vest and road hazard triangles. Not suggested. Required. Because when you break down, society wants you visible and safe. Cars here are much smaller, speed limits are lower and more often obeyed. Meanwhile, American roads have become an arms race of tank-like trucks and SUVs designed to make their occupants feel safe while being maximally dangerous to everyone else. U.S. pedestrian and cycling deaths have skyrocketed 77% since 2010. We shrug and blame distracted walkers and badly behaving cyclists, as if the problem is those just existing outside of cars rather than the cars themselves.

I’ve been shot at three times in the United States. Let that sink in.

Once, I was targeted in a racially charged attack because I looked like someone who’d yelled a slur out the bus window. Once, by a sniper in a city park, a bullet ricocheted off my belt buckle. Once, because I told two guys throwing glass bottles off a bridge to stop, they chased me and my best friend on our bicycles and fired six shots as we fled. I can still hear the fisssft fssvft fsssst of bullets flying past my ears.

I was one of over 150,000 people shot at and missed each of those years. Seventy-five thousand hit and injured. Over forty-five thousand killed.

Spain’s gun deaths in 2023? Fifty-four people in total. The entire nation of 47 million had fewer murders than Baltimore City alone.  Spain’s murder rate is one-ninth of the U.S. rate.

The U.S. has 120 guns per 100 people. Yemen—a country in active civil war—has the second-highest gun ownership rate at 54 per 100.

Here’s what “safer” actually feels like in Spain: Children often play in playgrounds unsupervised late at night. I can ride my bicycle without fear of getting mowed down by a speeding tank-like SUV.  My daughter and granddaughter walk at night without the careful calculations American women must learn: Which route, which street, which side, what time?

The United States has staggering wealth, brilliant people, and incredible technology. But we’ve chosen to let our commons, our shared spaces and services, crumble to feed an ideology that mistakes regulation for tyranny. We’ve normalized violence that would trigger an immediate crisis anywhere else. Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and the UK all severely restricted guns after their massacres. In the U.S., we tolerate daily mass shootings of at least four people gunned down, at the same time, Every Single Day.

And we call ourselves exceptional. Perhaps we are, in our level of violence, indifference, and inability to improve on so many quality of life metrics.

We’re staying in Spain permanently. Not because we’re giving up on America, but because our family history taught us that when you have to carry papers to prove citizenship, when people are randomly beaten and kidnapped by masked men, when you are the wrong color, it’s time to go. On average, it takes anywhere from 15- 50 years for societies to claw their way back from fascist regimes. It took Spain 39 years. Germany, 12 years, Italy, 21 years. We don’t have that kind of time, and we don’t want to feel fear in the meantime. What amazes me is how many countries have voted for fascists in the first place 

I believe Americans have rewritten our national anthem. It’s no longer “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” It’s “My Country, ‘Tis of Me.” Americans’ rugged individualism, which once meant scrappy self-reliance within a community, has metastasized into narcissistic self-absorption. Every policy debate centers on “What about MY rights?” with no question of “What are my responsibilities to others and how can I help?”

We didn’t just move away. We escaped as immigrants and refugees have for eons, with our lives in search of a better quality of life, and with our resolve to keep fighting intact. James Baldwin and others understood that sometimes you can do more for your country from a distance, from relative safety, than from inside a system actively trying to take you down and make you disappear. We left not because we’ve given up on those with fewer choices, but because we refuse to let the collapse claim us, too. From here, we’ll keep bearing witness, telling the truth, supporting those still fighting—without sacrificing our family to a house of horrors that’s already on fire.

Greg Cantori, Benajarafe, Spain