Letter to one of my oldest friends...lives on Gulf Islands

Dec. 21, 2016 R. Dale. As someone who lived in the same era as me, I ask you, can you think of a year that has unsettled our lives more than 2016? In fact, can you think of a more threatening event than Trump's election? Our generation has never experienced an event that disturbed the world order before, at least Canada's world order. 9/11 was not our attack. Chernobyl was not our disaster. Even the Cuban crisis (in hind sight) wasn't earth shattering. No, none of these events would upset our well being. This election however has great potential. I think of it as a bloodless coup The Americans finally rid themselves of the Bushes, the Clinton's and perhaps the military establishment that Roosevelt warned everyone of all those years ago. That remains to be seen of course but the sociopath who will occupy the Whitehouse in January doesn't seem to hold any allegiance to any person or principal that the rest of us can relate to. He's even dissing his own security people at the CIA and FBI. Who knows if he'll bow to the military establishment and keep funding the security forces. Mexico might be first on his list of who am I going to screw with today? But then, maybe he'll wake up and pick a fight with some other unsuspecting nation, like Canada. He's already pissed off the Chinese and he's not even President yet. The border between our two countries has never been more threatened, at least in my memory. Imagine if he decides to allow Great Lakes water to be diverted to Las Vegas, consequences be damned. We already knows how he feels about pipelines and global warming. I don't know enough about the Auto pact or NAFTA to comment but that too must be on his radar. I haven't spent much time trying to understand the electorate and what they were thinking when they voted for this guy. They were obviously pissed and perhaps a bit desperate. Life isn't too good for perhaps the majority of the American population. Who really knows what life is like in the hinterland of the U.S. This is hard for our generation to imagine. We've had it so good, particularly here in Canada, that we can't fathom that we could become so angry we'd vote a Trump into office. But then, as someone who's travelled a lot in the US, they've become a foreign country these past 15 years or so. I don't know them anymore. We have less in common than ever before. I think the Brexit vote was more understandable but then, they didn't have as much to lose as the American voters. There's a political commentator named Chris Hedges and he's been predicting this kind of revolution for a long time. As he so astutely points out in his essays, we can't expect the herd to sit still while the elite accumulates all of the wealth, refuses to share it and then changes the rules to collect even more of the wealth. The masses bought into this initially. However, a lot of shit has happened these past few years and that has fuelled the Trump flame....2008 banking disaster, Panama papers describing mass tax evasion by the rich, self serving and unjustified war in Iraq, Bush/Clinton families responsible for all of this and so on. History is simply repeating itself in one respect. The founding fathers in the years leading up to 1776 were alienated from their government in England and over time, found good reason to resent their elitist approach to governing. Imagine taxing the colonies to finance the good life in London. The big difference then was that the revolutionaries (Washington, Jefferson, Franklin etc.) who led the masses were the intellectual elite of the day, unlike now. Nothing intellectual about this group. Enough venting for one day. Stay well and perhaps I'll see you in the spring. I'm thinking of a road trip before my busy summer starts (lots of gigs in 2017, our Sesquicentennial). Talk soon...