Even before the shaking stopped, I recognized it. "Earthquake," I answered my speechless wife Erica's wide-eyed, open-mouthed, but unasked question about what the hell was happening. It was the evening of December 27th, 2010 and a 5.4 magnitude shaker had just hit central Puerto Rico, about fifteen miles away, giving us a short sharp series of significant house-rattling jolts. Once things settled down all I worried about was whether the shaker would spawn a tsunami that could swamp our tiny, low-lying mangrove island home just off Puerto Rico's south coast.

One grumbles about "the Jewish thing," blaming a cabal of Jewish reporters for his bad press. After a chance, late-night encounter in a Paris nightclub, another snarls at people who are or who look Jewish, "I love Hitler!" and, "Your mothers, your forefathers" would all be ‘gassed!' And in Hollywood the third does the guttural throat-clearing pronunciation, mockingly gargling the name ‘Chaim' to insult his Jewish boss. No it is not a sleepover for neo-Nazis. It is three of the highest profile celebrity icons of the modern-era letting us see how close to the surface anti-Semitism can be, even in famous smiley faces.

One of my family's treasured memories and one of my proudest achievements is sailing Voyager around the world. That's why I bought the old ketch in 1995; to fulfill that ultimate dream of anyone who has ever sailed beyond the breakwater into the open sea.

We departed Marion, the charming Massachusetts seafaring town on Buzzard's Bay in the summer of 1997; crossing the Atlantic, and through the Straits of Gibraltar. By the time we crossed the long Mediterranean and passed through the legendary Suez Canal, it was 1998. The first high drama came a week after the canal in the Gulf of Aqaba when we were run down by an Egyptian gunboat after making an unauthorized stop at one of their islands off the Sinai Peninsula near the Egyptian/Israeli border.

In September 2011, Sol Liliana Rivera our beloved five-year old will be among the four million other American children beginning kindergarten. Like the other members of her high school Class of 2023, she will nervously say good bye to her even more nervous mommy and daddy and take that giant step into the rest of her life. Stripped of the entire hi-tech, I-pad, interconnected world that will put all human knowledge at her little fingertips, much of what she experiences in school will not be that much different than what you and I faced at that hinge in our personal history. She will love some teachers, others not so much. There will be classes that captivate her and others that bore her. Some kids she meets will be nice, others mean. She and her classmates will be by turns attentive, restive or rowdy, eager or stubborn, brave or crying, "I want my mommy!"

 

Ask any Latino over 50; the Mubarak types were a dime a dozen South of the border. You could say we made the mold: the stereotypic strongman military officer who crushes democratic opposition, ditches the uniform, assumes the presidency, then rules forever or until his son can take over; most with the decisive support of the United States. Just since 1945, we backed 18 Latin American tin pot dictators. I interviewed a bunch of them over the decades, beginning with my first foreign assignment in 1973, a general who made himself president of Chile Augusto Pinochet. He's best remembered for herding his political opponents into football stadiums before disappearing them, bombing his own presidential palace and killing his one-time friend the democratically elected president Salvatore Allende. Pinochet then ruled with our backing from 1973 to 1990.