On November 3 we left Miami for Southhampton.  Right behind us,  Hurricane Raphael , was heading straight for Cayman Islands, where we were yesterday.  What a difference a few days can make. On November 5 there was another hurricane, named Donald Trump, who, defying any logic and all odds, got re-elected president of the USA.  My sleep pattern began to change, for I worried about the future of democracy in the U.S.  I was so perplexed at how far off I was towards understanding our nation, that, save for my exposition on the future of the country  the next day, for the rest of the trip pretty much avoided politics in my postings.  Today, I still seem to have lost interest in our future, for all seems lost.  Reminds me of Ray Bradbury's  A Sound of Thunder , where a time traveler returns home to find everything changed.  He would have expected Kamala Harris to prevail over Donald Trump, but the opposite happened because he stepped on a but...

In September,  Time  magazine  had an article that might foreshadow what beholds the USA, now that Donald Trump has been re-elected.  Let's go back to 2011 and to the birthplace of the  Arab Spring , Tunisia. Tunisia began this uprising, followed by Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, Tunisia with the public suicide of a vegetable vendor began a path towards democracy, the only Arab country that went in this direction. All went well until 2019 when Kais Saied was elected president on a populist platform disillusioned with political gridlock and economic stagnation.  The first major sign was in 2021 when Saied used the COVID-19 pandemic to centralize his power.  The first time Trump was elected, he was not experienced enough to do that. The Constitution was suspended, parliament was dissolved and opposition politicians, critics, activists, journalists and union leaders were persecuted.  Many of them were jailed. Tunisia had a presidential elect...