Looking Into my Blurry Crystal Ball.
Koh Lanta Island, Thailand, October 4th, 2024.
Salaroche
I DO believe Kamala Harris will win in November and I DO think her win may set the country up on a hopeful, even if long and bumpy, gravel road toward national moral renovation. My hopes, of course, bank heavily on whether the Dems also keep or, preferably enlarge, their majority status in the Senate and at least improve their numbers in the House if not, ideally, recapture the majority there altogether.
If at least the first two of those three factors are given by January 20th, 2025, I will most likely go back to California sometime soon thereafter. In other words, November 5th not only holds the key to the future of the United States, but quite likely holds the key to the rest of my days too.
I frankly cannot understand how at this point in time can anybody have doubts as to Kamala’s competence, particularly when comparing her to the other guy who is a convicted felon, sex-offender, insurrectionist, declared wannabe-dictator, who is willfully-incapable of accepting electoral defeat, who goes around dangerously slandering entire LEGAL immigrant communities and promising to prosecute his political rivals if reelected.
How can such an amoral, unprincipled, indecent individual be anybody’s choice for President of the United States? Do the people who are still undecided think Kamala is a COMMUNIST? (HA) (yes, I still believe some people CAN be as ridiculously ignorant as that)
There is indeed something really wrong in the American educational system when there are millions of American adults from all walks of life that are pitifully unable to elucidate by themselves what's best for themselves and for their own country and just like frightened, ignorant children, mercilessly fall prey to the insidious demagoguery of an egomaniac conman.
The deepest, most insulting injury is NOT being inflicted on America by that utterly-corrupt Donald Trump himself, but by the people who, in thoughtlessly following him, are basically spitting on the face of the American Democratic Experiment and are willing to throw the whole country down the toilet.
The other day, a friend who lives in Talent, Oregon, a State where some Maga-contaminated communities east of the State are proposing to secede and join Maga-poisoned Idaho, was asking me why would I want to go back to America.
I replied that I would go back ONLY if Kamala wins in November and even then I will still wait to see if she’s peacefully sworn-in on January 20th, 2025, and even then I will still wait and see whether the Republican leadership OPENLY accepts her presidency or goes once again down the mendacious road of denialism.
The thing is that the specter of an urban-guerrilla civil war in the style of “The Troubles”, the internal conflict that plagued Northern Ireland from 1960 to 1998 (the IRA vs. the British government) is always present in America, except that in the US the conflict would be much bigger and much bloodier, as the number of weapons circulating in America is much, much larger than the size of the population itself.
As to what part of Northern California I would like to go back to, the answer is: preferably Bay Area cities like Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, San Mateo, etc., where I know a good majority of people are pro-Democracy, pro-Rule of Law, pro-Decency individuals like me. I lived in Palo Alto and Menlo Park for a good number of years, so I’m somewhat familiar with that area and I like it. For the moment, however, everything is up in the air.
My Crystal ball is as blurry as that of anybody else’s, but even as far from American shores as we are here in Southeast Asia, we can still feel the fetid, ominous whiffs of authoritarianism emanating from the Republican leaders and from the Republican centers of power.
If somebody had told you back in the late ‘90s that America would be in such dire straits by the end of 2024, would you have believed them? I wouldn’t. But dire straits is exactly where the country finds itself today.
Vote Democrat in November. Voting Republican could easily mean sending the United States down the road toward dictatorship.
Salaroche