"If Bush wins I'm leaving the country"--some nostalgia and a question.

Let's look back to the year 2000. Here's an old Snopes inquiry:

Claim: Some celebrities promised to leave the USA if George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election.



Status: True.

So threatening to leave the country over Bush getting elected is at least boringly old. But here's the problem I have with the leaving-the-country meme. When rich celebrities and comfortably ensconced academics and other elite blue-staters say they feel like going to France/Canada/wherever, what are they talking about? Isn't your problem with Bush what he will (supposedly) do to other people -- the poor, the unfortunate, the underclass, the third worlders? Didn't you put aside your own interests -- which you proclaimed were actually served by Bush's tax cutting -- to oppose him for the sake of people who were not like you at all? If that is the case, what is the point of leaving the country? It shouldn't matter where YOU are, since your problem with Bush is with what he will do to people other than you? You were unselfishly concerned with others, weren't you? So what are you trying to achieve by leaving? Is it that you just don't want to be anywhere near those Jesuslanders who let "moral values" determine their votes? But I thought it wasn't all about you. I thought it was about other people! Or are you discovering that you really just don't like other people as much as you thought you did? They seemed so sympathetically in need of your love and concern before, but then they actually voted and even said things about why they voted the way they did, and then they seemed so horrible that you didn't want to be within a thousand miles of them.