Sitting with friends and family on New Years Eve 1999 having a good time & toasting the good times to come in the 21st Century, if someone had told me what changes would ring during the first two decades of this bold new venture I would not have believed them. In fact I probably would have laughed! Back then I was (mistakenly?) full of hope and optimism. I had just turned 40, so I couldn't exactly call it the folly of youth, but from where I sit today that's certainly what it feels like right now.
First we had 9/11, then George 'Dubya' and the War on Terror, the Iraqi insurgency and subsequent rise of ISIS, all this and we were barely halfway through the first decade! Then 8 short years ago hope was rekindled in the form of Barack Obama and I think many of us thought that we (the human race, that is) had perhaps turned a corner. If America can vote in a black President - a black President - then maybe all wasn't lost despite the horrors we were witnessing on our TV screens and increasingly on our mobiles. I remember how I cried watching Obama give his acceptance speech, and then shortly afterwards his inaugural address! It would all be okay! The human race has finally come to it's senses - the most powerful man in the world was someone to whom we could relate to, someone who (after reading his books) understood the realities of everyday life, someone who genuinely seemed like a good guy!
But it was a false dawn! We'd all been hoodwinked, not by Obama, but by the American political system. Any good Obama tried to do was stymied by a jealous and resentful Republican Congress and we, (the people) as time passed, began to see how the President himself wielded very little direct power in order to fulfil his pledges. Without the backing of the representatives in the Congress nothing it seemed was possible. Across the States we now see the direct result of that Republican policy of nullification; disenchantment, disenfranchisement and a population that has turned it's head away from the Political mid-line to face, more or less directly, to the right.
The most shocking and nasty election campaign that I can remember has now left us with the wholly divisive President Trump, a damning indictment on the legacy of Barack Obama (I am very sad to say). In the end for Obama, being a nice, good guy just didn't get the job done it seems, and so America turned away from warmth of Obama's fire to let in the cold chill and frosty ideas of Donald Trump and I, for one, am scared. Scared, not just for America and what it now will mean to be an American in the wider context of the rest of the world (who I can bet are largely shaking their heads in disbelief), but scared for the planet as a whole. If Trump, for example, manages to rip up the Paris accord as he has pledged to do, climate change will undoubtedly speed up. If the world's biggest polluter turns it's back on the overwhelming scientific evidence and opts out then we really are a doomed race, with perhaps the saddest part being that we will doom many innocent species to the dustbin of extinction in our wake. Other nations will follow where America goes and before we know it there won't be any coral reefs to dive on; hurricanes and typhoons will be get stronger and stronger until the annual destruction and despair they bring overwhelms us; localised patterns of drought and flooding will be expounded and multiplied until large parts of our planet become uninhabitable. And so on....! Of course, we won't see these effects during Trump's Presidency or possibly even during his lifetime, but his children will; our children will, because we are right now on a razors edge climatically and all it will take is one little push in the wrong direction to set us all down the path of no return. This isn't just scary, it's downright criminal, but it's what America has likely done for us all yesterday. Bye bye world as we know it!
And that's just one aspect of the potential disasters that may well unfold over the next 4 years. Don't even start me on the Russian expansion programme that (I've no doubt) Putin will have in mind as Trump crumbles the NATO alliance and opens us all up the possibilities of a second Cold War (and possibly even more) that promises to be a whole lot warmer than the first! Or how his 'straight talking' foreign policies will alienate every Muslim nation and lead to a putative rise in global terrorism. Or how his ideas on immigration will isolate America, as well as making Americans persona non grata outside of the States.
Really, I could go on all day, but you know all the arguments. The upshot is that the world changed today and, in my opinion, not for the better! Now we all just have to stand back, spectate and hope against hope that the worst doesn't happen.
Fingers crossed for us all!
