My adopted US homeland should be wary of making the same mistakes.

Though the electorate at this moment is sensibly focused on achieving a victory that will grant some reprieve and solace, such an urgency should not postpone the need for an overdue reckoning with the dark imperfections in our history and national character that generated the conditions for the republic to be in such dire peril.

Those conditions, enabled by those who enabled Trump and ignored his danger, his nastiness, his serial mendacity, will probably endure well beyond the day (if it comes) when he leaves the White House. We will be left to contend with the worst traits of the US’s past that he exalted and exacerbated: the imperial arrogance, the nativism and misogyny, the ecological degradation, the assault on minority and workers’ rights, the myth of exceptionalism.

That is the somber lesson that Chile yesterday and today whispers to us from afar. Only a profound and painful self-examination of our identity, what the splendid guardians of this experiment that started 250 years ago are demanding, can help to stave off the ominous possibility that years from now the country will be facing a repetition of the current terrifying crisis.

“Losing Bart destroys the Bay Area economy,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, former head of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), now on a sabbatical. “All of the large Bay Area technology companies and the business associations that represent them understand that there’s no Bay Area tech economy without Bart.”

In January, the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism unit sent out a memo warning police officers about a new potential “security and counterintelligence” threat: Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

The memo directed officers to “conduct thorough inspections of all eyewear permitted within inmate cells” and cautioned that people who have been arrested could use these glasses, equipped with small cameras and microphones, to record inside police facilities. The memo cited two examples of such videos posted on social media.

“The ability to covertly record inside a law enforcement or detention facility, could result in a security risk if proprietary information about cell layouts, camera placements, or officer patrol/site protection routines are released,” the memo read.