Four Fewer Years

Four years of this, minimum. 

One part of me is sort of excited, another part has a finger on the OFF switch. 

I'm not sure I can really face all the moaning and griping from latte-quaffing liberal America that a Trump presidency will inevitably induce. 

I do sometimes wish that the USA could learn to be more of its own problem, like Britain has had to. 

I wish that I could be about as interested in the fact that they have elected an authoritarian buffoon to their highest office as I would be if Canada or Australia had done it. 

But one just cannot help getting rather literally yanked back into it. 

The tentacles are everywhere. Facebook doesn't help, that's for sure. Many of my friends live there, or used to. I largely make my living in the US, in their currency, paying their taxes, so I too am, in a sense, a stakeholder. 

And the USA has a proven track record, since WWII at least, of interfering in the region where I now live in a thoroughly deleterious manner, going back to the Eisenhower government's sponsorship of the coup of 1954 in Guatemala, which lead to 60+ years of internal conflict instability. 

Many of the Donald's 'blue sky' policy suggestions represent a clear and present danger to the economies of Mexico and the Central American nations. 1m Guatemalans live and work in the US, many of them not so legally. If Trump keeps his promise to undertake mass deportations the impact down here could genuinely traumatic. And whilst many were indeed economic migrants in the first place, some were also consciously seeking to put some distance between themselves and the effects of US policy.  

If their country was located on the other side of the Atlantic, Mexicans would undoubtedly benefit from freedom of movement. They are wealthier than Bulgarians, so the Republican party's approach to them makes UKIP rhetoric seem quite tame. Would Europeans ever take seriously the idea of a wall across their continent? 

Anyway, there I go again. Make it stop.