2017 started with a bang.
These kind of images are commonplace today, but I never expected to see them in Washington D.C.
Venezuela had already been in flames, but I was shocked to return to my birthplace and see similar chaos roiling Washington D.C. on Inauguration Day.
What started as small symbolic stare-downs in the center of town quickly grew into a full blown riot – with tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, robocops and burning limousines.
D.C. was supposed to be the standard bearer for democracy – I’d never seen my hometown like that, especially up close – the childhood illusion of living in the heart of modern civilization was gone.
The day after was the Women’s March which managed to restore some faith in my concept of America.
The same violent streets from the day before were replaced by hundreds of thousands more hopeful souls from all over the country. Even the vastly outnumbered National Guard deployed to ostensibly command the crowds stopped pretending and gave in to the overwhelmingly positive energy.
Coming from a fully collapsed Venezuela to what seemed like a newly collapsing United States was a head trip to say the least. I wasn’t ready to lose both my countries – my two constants for almost four decades – to the ideological extremes of both left and right.
What felt like a purely reflexive racial and cultural backlash to the previous administration was grotesque in rhetoric but ended up being relatively manageable in policy. The Supreme Court was still a viable branch of government back then and federal judges fulfilled their roles in checking and balancing this adolescent reactionary administration.
What happened to the United States sucked – but I still recognized it as the United States.
Venezuela had become something else entirely.
Having soundly lost parliamentary elections, the ruling party formed a parallel congress to write a new constitution which declared themselves the supreme power banning the freshly elected opposition-led National Assembly in "support and solidarity" with the President.
That’s when my mother’s condition got worse – and I went back.
To be continued..
