Scylla and Charybdis


My compatriots seem unable to talk about anything else, so great is their dread of waking up on Wednesday to learn that what they consider … – actually, I’d better not say what they consider him – … anyway, that he will turn out to be the world’s most powerful man.

The media here is unequivocal, to my regret, disregarding a whole set of human foibles, one of them being that a human being inevitably tends to consider the bad guy’s counterpart a good guy.

On the other side of the globe, however, the US side, I suspect that apathy has settled in. I wish to send a greeting to fellow humans “over there”, as we used to say back in the 1890s and in the decades between the two world wars, when hordes of my countrymen fled from poverty to the States:

This is your chance, man! Pull up your socks and turn your country around. Start work now! Today! Look beyond Scylla and Charybdis. What you want is an honourable future for your country. Tell them you no longer accept the shame of your country’s universally known human rights record. A country so rich in natural and financial resources, with such wonderful universities! Yet so many destitute people, lousy schools and ignorant citizens. Such appalling treatment of blacks! So much brazen racism! So much narrow-minded, sanctimonious bigotry!

Your system isn’t working, quite simply. It never will. Something’s got to change, or the whole structure will topple. The United States’ resistance to change is almost as pathetic as that of some religious fanatics’ with whom I am sure you don’t want to be compared.

Look to Canada, for instance. If they can do it, so can you. Right?