News + Politics

The environment around you can determine your interest. I am a proud believer in this; I feel my parents have shaped my interests. I’m a big classic rock fan; The Beatles, Three Dog Night, and Bob Dylan were always playing in my house. Our vacations were mostly educational; historical Boston, Massachusetts, Colonial Virginia, even at Disney we took a tour about Walt Disney. They molded us into history buffs, into cultured people. Every time I see a late-night show where they quiz the public on basic history about our country, I am impressed with how much my mother and father taught me.

When Ernesto Gálvez declared, with an air of erudition and a sense of pride, that “in Guatemala, we should’ve done what the Argentines did with the Indians,” he didn’t know he was calling for his own death, and that in an unrelated chain of events, his bloodline would soon come to an end due to an astonishing, far-reaching combination of natural disasters, drinking, and erectile dysfunction.

It had been 20 years since they’d seen each other, and neither knew what to say. David and David Junior, or DJ as his family affectionately called him sat and stared at each other. Each intensely studying the features that they had only seen in the mirror up until this point. They both seemed to be astonished by how much they resemble the other. The younger man had been trying kid this his whole life, but did his best to dismiss it. Even when presented with pictures to prove it, he still shrugged off the comparisons like a running back breaking a tackle. But now, face to face, he couldn’t deny the fact that he was basically staring into a mirror. The older man had spent the last 2 decades in Jefferson City Correctional Facility for manslaughter. And while the crime was committed in self defense, his public defender still pushed him to take a plea deal. “It’s better than the life sentence I would’ve caught for the weight in my trunk.” That’s the way he justified it at the time, and that same thought had brought him a sense of peace over the past 7,254 days. But here he was, just a few months shy of parole, staring at his doppelganger across a steel table.

The energy landscape is lately a boiling geostrategic board, and after the wars that arose around former hegemonic kings of the energy manna, disruptive solutions for the future are now joining, which either bring new alternative sources or offer solutions for the latter to improve their capabilities.

BRYCE ON POLITICS

The 17th in a series of 20 on the Democratic National Conventions