Beyond Selidor

I think everyone really needed the rest, so I guess it was a good thing the weather forced that to happen. I'm glad the worst that happened where you were was furniture blowing around — I know it's been pretty bad in other parts of the country, and in Ireland.

It's been a very interesting few days keeping up with the news! I am intrigued how this may influence America in the coming days, if at all.

It certainly has! One thing I would like to result from this — although I don't have much hope about it — is for progressive-minded people from the US, and other powerful countries in the west to understand that they can learn a lot from the experiences and actions of people in other countries, especially people whose experience of democracy is still relatively new (such as in South Korea, which has only been a democracy for about 40 years), or where they are still struggling to establish it (such as in Georgia). If we were capable of learning from them, and making similar choices, we would be a lot more capable of facing the threats to our own fragile democracies. They all learn from and help each other: Georgians and Ukrainians have been trading tips on surviving violence at the hands of riot police cracking down on mass protests, Syrians and Ukrainians hold joint events and learn from each other in building civil society resilience and surviving aerial bombardment, and so on. I would like people who come from wealthier, older, more established democracies to have the humility to learn from their example, and to see the connections between their situations and ours.