Here in the US, summer is giving way to autumn and the trees are turning colour. A growing nip in the morning air, while often a rain-soaked evening breeze blows dead yellowed leaves across the tree-bounded fields into the murmur of the nearby pond. Life runs or strolls or gallops, as your status and locale may be.  In the affluent suburbs, people go about their daily business, wondering whether it is now time to get a self-driven Tesla, or trying to read the tea leaves of the stock market. Middle-class families worry about balancing the budget and paying their mortgages Elsewhere, on the busy indifferent streets of a metropolis like New York, destitute old women aimlessly wheel their entire possessions in overloaded shopping carts and tired men in oversized, frayed overcoats rest on park benches, watching the traffic while sipping from brown-bagged bottles. Life has its own rhythms and compulsions for all of them.  

For someone like me, a traveller from a land that neighbors the arena of a deadly war initiated by the US, this normalcy of life here is a surprise. Indeed, it seems almost like an insult, an unexpressed declaration of the irrelevance of the deaths, devastation and turmoil that have been unleashed by this country far from its own shores.  So, I think, if this war of choice that has now become a quagmire has apparently made no impact on the lives of the American people, what exactly is it that is preoccupying them in, the second year of a deeply divisive and flawed Trump presidency?

I follow the news, the talk shows, the political analysts, the podcasters, and the stand-up artists to get a sense of how people are thinking and feeling. I find undercurrents of discomfort, apprehensions, and frustration with the direction and the flow of events. Apprehensions about the fear of loss of empire, with the growing suspicion that the affluence and the way of life they take for granted may be threatened by forces that they neither comprehend nor control. These apprehensions are manifested in various ways, some of which I will describe as I feel them.

As far as the impact of the Iran war and the closure of the Hormuz goes, fuel prices have increased significantly (40-45% on average) if not overwhelmingly. General inflation is at 3.7%, up from 2.4% in February 2026. Consequently, it is no surprise that as far as reactions to the war go, there is, in general, disapproval. This does not appear to be a disapproval rooted in a principled or moralistic position; it is more of a pragmatic or realist objection.” If you didn’t have a winning strategy, you should at least........

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