The western world is in turmoil, economic and social, as its leaders in the US, UK and Canada increasingly adopt far right-wing views that have time and again failed to achieve their promise. The favourite scenario is lower taxes to enable companies to expand, or start new businesses, thus employing more people. But there is little proof that companies will do anything other than expand dividends to shareholders, thus raising stock prices and their own private valuations, prompting profit-taking, to splurge or squirrel away the money, until the next social-conscious government

comes in and restores taxes. Far from what right-wingers like Trump asserted, the poor is never in a bracket that benefits from tax cuts, and invariably face rising prices for everything, new pressures for food, shelter and clothing. In the USA, Trump has stirred animosity at every level of his authority, the latest result being the failure of APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) to issue a consensus report this year, as Trump’s sanctions against China has fouled cooperation; his unilateral acts against Iran underestimates Iranian resolve, and miscalculated the withdrawal of Iranian oil from world markets; already the exemption of certain buyers has angered his Saudi friends, even as the Kashoggi murder embarrassed them.
In the recent mid-term elections voters rejected Trump, whose sourness and pathological personality, have worsened, if that was even possible; but he claims victory as Republicans kept their Senate majority, which was his wish before the elections. What this does is protect him from conviction at any impeachment next year. The results gave Trump new grounds for mendacity, with the inevitable media challenges. One of these led to his hasty cancellation of a CNN reporter’s White House press pass, which a Republican judge ordered him to reinstate. Trump is vindictive and petty enough to find other ways to harass this reporter. Trump also targetted special prosecutor Mueller, who has finally asked him for information.
Meanwhile loyal Melania Trump is not to be ignored, as she criticised White House staffers who she wishes would join the parade of recent departures, including Jeff Sessions, ex-Attorney General.
Trump wants to cancel the birthright qualification for citizenship and sponsorship that the US has proudly boasted. Trump has probably forgotten that he is a first generation US-born citizen, and that many of the people, non-whites particularly, that he abuses, were Americans for many generations before his; remember that it was the natives who preserved the land so well that he can now despoil it, with realtor friends, for example, by reducing the areas of Grand Canyon National parks, a fragile ecosystem with threatened life forms that development, water depletion and pollution, mining, cattle-rearing, killing wild life on land, air and water, will destroy.
Trump is as likely to exploit the coal and uranium deposits as Harper was the Alberta tar sands. Development for short-term riches!
Trump’s conflicts of interest are worrisome, but that has not bothered him, though they might figure significantly in any plan for impeachment; he must be the most impeachable of US presidents, making Nixon a novice; his business deals often determine his government’s policy, as with Brazil, Philippines, Canada, UK, and twenty or so other countries as disclosed by the Centre for American Progress of Washington DC; quarrels with China and Mexico and others are ongoing issues, and lies to US audiences including “invasion” by Latin Americans whom he charges as bringing crime and pestilence to the USA.
Speaking on the California fires, he has probably lied in saying that the Finnish PM told him that they raked their forests!
Over in Europe, Theresa May is on shifting ground with Brexit; her deal was followed by weakness in the pound, but she holds tightly to power, despite criticism within her ranks and the press. Deutsche Bank CEO, Christian Sewing, perhaps finger-pointing at Theresa May, opined that nationalism is not a policy favoured by the Union and recited EU gains: peace, economic development, free movement of labour within Europe, and establishment of various positive schemes in the financial industry.
May faces strong criticism for the weaknesses, delays and other hardships, including complex and compulsory on-line application forms, in adopting a fair implementation of its 2010-12 Universal Credit for the existing six-pronged support programs for the poor and jobless: job-seekers, employment, income, housing, worker and child tax credits; it’s full implementation is now 2023. Up to thirty Conservative MP's are threatening to vote against her government over this issue.

I am at that stage where I understand the moment itself is just as important when a memory is etched as the time and place where it occurred; that this transformative moment is also a starting point in the journey of discovery and self-discovery. I never fail to be amazed at an early, transforming event in my life as a young boy, when in new and uncomfortable shoes (with laces), Ma took me on a long road trip to a faraway place, which meant transferring from different vehicles, to visit her older daughter, my auntie, who after getting married, had moved to the deep south, “Behind God’s back!”, as the family perpetually complained, to start her life as a newly-wed.

For a young boy with large, wide eyes, it meant getting into a few taxis and then on a large, blue, and trundling bus. However, it all started in the first vehicle, a packed, private-hired car, where I excitedly stood by the rolled-down window with my face safely inside, rather than sitting in the security of Ma’s lap, resisting with an annoyed shrug and my signature creased brows her arms threatening to enclose and restrain me like two seatbelts that buckled together with those strong, interlocked fingers.
It was from the perch of the rolled-down car window, the warm air blowing into my hair and eyes, where I looked out to a landscape changing from the dirt-red erosion cut into the hillsides as runnels from rainfall, to become fields and fields of green sugar-canes lit yellow with sunlight, the tires of the car crunching below on the bumpy, gravelled, and mostly potholed macadam road.
It was to a chorus of complaints from the driver about the wear-and-tear on the straining, creaking suspension system of his aged and labouring vehicle, which sometimes jolted suddenly and so hard it lifted Ma’s petite frame off the coarse red-fabric seat. It was from this unsteady place where I watched the landscape shape-shifting before my voracious eyes, becoming bridges that spanned deep gullies, with its brown water rushing away below, rapidly viewed through rusted gridworks of bolted iron beams.
Then, to an amazement that peeled my eyes open to its fullest display of whites, the houses that appeared were not thatched. Instead, its walls were either concrete or red-brick, not grey-and-white adobe decorated with open handprints, its intertwining reinforcement of grass erupting in spots like patchworks of discoloured fur. The houses stood side by side, its inhabited clotheslines revealing a known, intimate familiarity with each other, almost rubbing shoulders, with rusted roof tops peaked like the beaks of birds, and almost kissing like the yellow-chested kiskadees that jumped in place in celebration of companionship and just being alive.
I would have jumped in place for joy like the kiskadee, the mobility of the forward motion of the car, and the newness of discovery of a bigger, more vibrant world energising me with a frenetic, bird-like excitement, if Ma was not firmly restraining me with her stabilising, but restrictive hands, since there was hardly any legroom in the tight-fit and close-press of the other passengers cramped into the sardine-tin-can that was our vehicle.
I wonder now if what she was doing was disciplining my enthusiastic urge to experience what is new and thrilling with the intuitive restraints adults deploy on children, so lessons in etiquette are taught by example while in cramped, social spaces. Now that I look back, I recall the back seat of the car heaved shoulder into shoulder as its passengers lifted with each jolt. Perhaps Ma, claustrophobic in this space, did not want my enthusiasm to spill into an episode of offended territory, where the hard heels of my new shoes (with laces), had painfully stepped on someone’s toes.
We spilled gratefully out of the car like so many beans, breathing a commingling of smells of the ocean, crabs, and rotting vegetables to a tremendous bustle of sweating men cursing while pushing handcarts, with women balancing wicker baskets on their heads and gliding with arms akimbo. It was a marketplace, a spatiality I have since loved and always return to whenever I visit the homeland. For it is here, in this coalescence, where different worlds come together from many divergences, grouping together into the transformative and leveling language of trade.
Stalks of sugar canes, each sharply-cut edge raw and white, stacked into bundles and leaning against a chain-link fence did not interest me, since these had arrived through the familiar path of my known, lived world. I recall my fascination at the fastness of the binding in green and yellowed grasses twisted into unbreakable strands, so the claws of crabs remained immobilised and entangled with fatal knots.
In a mound that was becoming a mountain, two men were piling up yams with exaggerated care, interlocking each as if building a wall, so one yam fit into another, each a foundation for the other. The moment was transformative, for me a start to the discovery of structure. I stood in my newly-laced shoes and wondered, until Ma’s urgent hands dragged me away.

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