This is my page for one of my latest endeavors, something I call "Projekt Skanda," which is my faux-Swedish phrase for "Project Scandinavia." The thrust of Projekt Skanda is to somehow get me to Scandinavia in any manner possible. And actually, while it focuses on broadly Scandinavia (defined as Norway, Denmark, Sweden; as I understand it, when you include Finland and Iceland, then you are talking about "the Nordic countries" ), it more narrowly focuses on Sweden but can also be broadened to encompass all of Western Europe.
The Origin of Projekt Skanda
PS originally started out as a joke-that-really-was-serious in a sense. I've joked for some time now that "the new American dream is to marry a European," which, to a certain type of American, let's say one who is "educated-but-not-wealthy," rings true. It's a joke, but not really. Let's face it, we were all raised with this "rah rah rah America fuck yeah!" mentality, but when we reached, I dunno, "a certain age," we realized that all the crap about the American Dream and how Europe was a weird, strange place where everyone was fey and foppish was just that: crap. We began to hear about how some European countries mandated 5 weeks of vacation, how people worked much, much less in France, how healthcare and education in some countries was free (and the system worked!) and, of course, the concept of the "social safety net," which many of us knew only as "welfare" here, something evil to be avoided and dismantled. And I think that those of us with half a brain thought about these things we heard about Europe and realized, "Hey. That's how things OUGHT to be! Maybe all this talk about the evils of socialism is just propaganda." Which brings us to Sweden...
...But let's back up a few years, before we knew that Europe is really where it's at. Remember all the gay marriage brouhaha a few years ago over here, like back in the early 90s, before it became a tool of the right wing to further brainwash stupid Americans (who, thanks to our complete lack of education here, have become dumber and dumberer) whose lives wouldn't be affected one way or the other by the issue? I do; not with crystal clarity--it was a long time ago--but I remember it as I attended the Equal Rights March on Washington in 1993 and paid attention to the issue for quite a while after that. Well, I recall at some point hearing that Denmark had legalized gay marriage. Or let gay people serve openly in the military. Or something or other. And I was stunned! Denmark?! I knew almost nothing about it, other than that there was a city there called Copenhagen and it was one of those countries where everyone was blond and pretty. I think it was that moment that I became interested in Scandinavia. And the more I learned about it, the more I liked--it had a very educated populace, the churches were largely empty..... It seemed like a very enlightened (if chilly) place. I wanted to visit one day, maybe live there.
Flash back to fewer years ago. I had a little love affair with Australia for a while, but it didn't last, and things returned to normal. Of course, every now and then a story about Scandinavia, heavily represented by Sweden, would pop up in the news and every single time I read one I thought, "My cod, they're so ADVANCED!" (Contrast this to news stories about Florida, where I originally come from--every time a story popped up about that place I would think, "My cod, they're [we're] all a bunch of NUTS!!") I became finally and utterly convinced that Scandinavia was the most advanced society on the planet. And the more I looked into it, the more the facts bore it out: free education, subsidized healthcare, high voter participation, strong social safety net, high equality.....Sure, the taxes were high, I guess, but then I remember getting a huge bonus check from a job one year and, after taxes, netting about half of the amount on the check. "How could the taxes be higher than this?" I wondered. And sure, people said to me: "Well, you'll never get rich in Sweden." Ummmm, it should go without saying that none of the people whoever said this has "gotten rich" or is getting rich in America. In fact, at present, we're all getting poorer. Much poorer.But although Scandinavia seemed like the Promised Land, it also seemed, in a world without facebook and ubiquitous blogs and all that networked stuff, like the Impossible Dream to ever get there, or even meet anyone from there (even though I'd met, quite by accident, someone from Finland, although I knew little about the Nordic countries at that time). As the internet expanded, however, I came to see that I could meet some people from over there, but I also realized that if you wanted to work there, you probably had to be an engineer or a doctor or something that a citizen there could not do. Meanwhile, as the internet is growing and I'm discovering Scandinavia, there's that ongoing disaster called the Bush presidency going on in this country--senseless wars are happening, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and dumber, jobs are being shipped to India and China, the economy is tanking, the dollar is plummeting, and fear and fatalism is transforming America into a place that those of us who grew up here no longer recognize. And as we're discovering that Europe, with her policies, is so much more... HUMANE than the United States (qv Sicko if you need convincing), we want to escape there. (I guess at this point we can mention the irony--that people originally fled Europe to seek a better life here; now we try to return for that better life.)
...Coming back to today. America is in the shitter. Bush fucked the country as much as he fucked everything he ever attempted in his life, and now, with banks collapsing and the mortgage crisis and wealth inequality rivaling some African nations, it's worse than many of us feared it could get. And yet a lot of people seem to either have completely lost hope or, to paraphrase Barack Obama (who got it right) are clinging ever more fiercely to guns and religion, as if more of either could help this country out of the mess it's become. And the best we can hope for at this point is that a Democratic president MIGHT be able to reverse some of the worst the republicans have done; MIGHT be able to get our troops out of Iraq and avoid conflict with Iran; MIGHT be able to mop up some of this economic mess, but probably not. Single-payer healthcare isn't on the agenda. The problems are too entrenched for one president to fix any of them, and if a Democratic president can't fix them, the people will vote in another from the other party, who will make them worse. And this doesn't mention the new McCarthyism that seems to have taken hold in the country--America is starting to feel like what was sold to us as the Soviet Union. And a lot of us want to just escape---get out before we need to go to the hospital, or before American citizens start being "disappeared," etc. And get to a country where we feel like we're not on a superhighway to Hell, where we feel like the priorities are more in line with what we believe is right, where we can contribute to something good (not unlike the Puritans who originally settled the US).
I think a lot of us Americans are looking to Europe now and seeing that place. Sure, there isn't anywhere that's perfect, and every place has problems, but at least they're getting more things right in some countries over there. Like work--they work to live, not the other way around like we're supposed to pretend here; and they get real vacation time. When did taking vacation become something evil, something to avoid doing?!? So I, of course, look at Europe and see Scandinavia. They get so much right--from voter participation to less religion to gender equality to gay rights to vacation and healthcare and all the rest.... Yes, there are surely things that are wrong over there--one thing that disturbs me is the most recent shift to the right in Sweden--but overall, it's a completely different existence over there. I want to experience that. I want to be a part of that. I want to know what it means to be a Scandinavian.
Scandinavia brings to mind many things here--IKEA, H&M, hats with horns, Swedish meatballs, Pippi Longstocking, ABBA, Roxette, the midnight sun, weird food involving herring, Norwegian oil--but I think one of the top 5 things that people think of when they think of Scandinavia, and especially Sweden, is the political climate over there. The (cue the minor string stabs) SOCIALISM!!!!!! The HIGH TAXES!!!! The WELFARE!!!!!! It's all presented to us Americans as very scary and unworkable, but the "Swedish model" worked for a long time, and frankly I'm not clear on why it allegedly doesn't work now--perhaps the aging population, who knows.... But the point is that Scandinavia has a reputation for being a pretty liberal place, politically and socially. I remember reading something in L Magazine once that had the sentence, "many think it's just another liberal myth, like 'Sweden'." I don't remember the full quote, but you get the idea. To illustrate the idea further, Fred Phelps, the "God Hates Fags" guy who protests at funerals and is pretty much considered a lunatic across the board, actually create a site called "God Hates Sweden." If that's not an endorsement IN FAVOR OF Sweden, then I don't know what is. If Fred Phelps's deity hates Sweden, then it must be a pretty good place, right? The kind of place that I might like to live...
So now we're back in the present. I guess I started joking around with people a few months ago, saying that I want to marry a Swede or Dane or Norwegian, and that I'd marry ANYONE, young/old, guy/girl, blah blah blah, and that if anyone knew anyone.... And then I'd say, "I'm just kidding." And then follow that with "No, I'm not kidding. I'm serious as a gas attack." Was I kidding? Well, of course I was. I wouldn't marry someone I didn't know out of the blue like that. It was a nice fantasy, though, if I married for love, and it was fun to talk about. But then one day I was all blue at work and I thought to myself, "Moving to Sweden and creating a liveable existence here are about equally unlikely. Which means they're equally likely. America has not been a success for me--why not concentrate on getting to Sweden?" So I decided to make it a "project," and christen it with a fake-Scandinavian sounding name. "Projekt Skanda" worked pretty well. And thus it was born, still a tongue-in-cheek joke but backed by a very real desire. And I started to really tell everyone about how much I wanted to get over there.
And then things started to happen. I met a few Norwegians. I met some Swedes online. I started talking with them. Not proposing marriage, but just trying to build friendships. And then I started to wonder: could this "projekt" actually ...succeed? I mean, I knew someone who'd lived in Rejkavik for a while (and raved about it), and was able to work because she had a friend whose company sponsored her. What if I met someone like that? What if I met someone who could help show me the process of getting over there, or who could direct me to someone who could? What if, as long as we're thinking really big, I met someone and actually did fall in love? Gradually this crazy idea I had started to seem like it could almost be possible. (And I started wondering if I should be documenting all the steps in pictures and video and the like.) At its heart the Projekt became something born both of a deep sense of fatalism and some indomitable optimism, something crazy, but maybe just crazy enough to work. So I decided to focus more on it, to put more energy into it and see if I couldn't accomplish the impossible. After all, what's more impossible than moving halfway across the world to a place that most Americans barely have any sense of, plopping myself down in a completely different culture and carving out an existence? If I could actually make that happen, for real--how wonderful would that be?! What an amazing feat, a coup! It still seems on the very edges of plausibility, but it is at least in the neighborhood. And if I could accomplish something so big and so daunting, well, I can't even begin to imagine how I would feel. About myself. About others. About life in general. So many dreams fall away as you get older, and it's easy to lose hope---but to invent a new dream and make it real... That would be a the closest thing I can imagine to a miracle.
And so that's where we stand now. I'm embarking on a journey, and I don't know whether it will ever get anywhere. But the more I think about it, the more I see avenues that could lead there, there in this case being Sweden. But that, of course, raises a question: What then? Let's say I moved tomorrow. I could imagine a year or two of a whirlwind, as I picked up the language and the culture and made friends, but then everything settling down and life becoming normal again. What's next? Would it just be a different flavor of America---plain old office job, the same old life in a different but colder country? Sure, I'd have the benefits that I don't have here and a whole lot of excitement, but so much else would be the same. Is that worth all the trouble? Short answer: yes. If the things that make Sweden and Europe a place so desirable remain, even if in a more limited form, then yes, it would be worth it to live there. Even if only for a few years. Long answer: Yes and no--because if one is going to work a miracle, one shouldn't go halfway. If there's something I can accomplish there that I can't here, for whatever reason, then I should reach for the stars. Honestly, I haven't figured this part out yet, but it's made me think that part of Projekt Skanda should be building bridges with people who have lives similar to a life I would want: a more creative, more fulfilling existence. How to do this? I don't know. But I'm thinking about it. Because PS isn't about being "the geographic cure." It's about creating a new existence, a better life. And really creating a better life means changing lots of things, not just your mailing address.
Another question: One of the first things people always ask me is "Why Scandinavia?" Well, I think I've pretty much answered that when I refer to the culture of the place and its magic, so let's turn that question around: "Why Ed Shepp? What can Ed Shepp bring to Scandinavia?" When I first emailed people about PS, asking them what I could do for Sweden, a couple people asked, "Does it matter?" Well, of course it matters. Do I have anything to bring to the party? How can I ask a place to accept me and allow me to live among them if I'm only thinking about me, me, me?? After all, part of my attraction to Scandinavia, and part of a value system that I'd like to see take root, is an idea of community, of supporting one another, of coming together and combining knowledge and competencies and creativity to create a better world. So I feel like if I really want to move over there, I should have something that I am bringing to them. What do I have now? Well, I have the phenomenon that is Ed Shepp (and that sounds SOOOOOOOOOOO much more pretentious than I intend)--meaning, that I have my humor and my experiences and everything that I am to share with them. But I also have a curiosity and a willingness to learn. I have a respect for the culture (and I don't want to see it deliquesce into something like today's America, should it shift further right). I have my various skills and abilities, which may be valuable in the job market, but I'd prefer to use them to make people happier, to improve peoples' lives in a place where that just might be possible. I'm reminded of something that exists in Sweden that amazes me: the Iglo Ljuscafe. It's a coffeeshop that serves breakfast "with a side of light." Basically, it brings light therapy for seasonal depression to the people. What a concept!!! I'd love to open something like that here, but more to the point, I'd like to bring ideas like that there, if it's within my capacity to come up with them. So I want to bring ideas, and I want to contribute. On the other hand, I don't want to be an ugly American and presume that I know what's best for another culture. I just want to work in the spirit of making an optimal society, and isn't that a principle that has guided the development of modern-day Scandinavia? Yes? Or no? I guess one of the objectives of PS is to find out. So if you're over there, tell me: What could I bring; what could I do for your society? Do you have ideas? Would you like to start something? I like to think of my li'l Projekt as building bridges between peoples. That starts with ideas, and hopefully ends with a better world.
And I guess that's the concept at the heart of Projekt Skanda: a better world. For me, for whoever I meet along the way, and wherever I land. Perhaps PS is crazy, perhaps I'm crazy. Or perhaps, in the end, it's about hope.
And beeping.
Beep!
Ed Shepp
