In the seventies, my husband lived in Algeria, he worked for an American company that was building a plant.

Last night he was telling me about living in a communist country and what it was like for both the Algerians and those expatriates that were living there. I don’t know how to live in that kind of society, but I fear we might all need to learn.

In Algeria, you must carry your papers at all times. Everyone must. If you are caught with a product that is considered to be in short supply, it will be confiscated. If you try to fight that, you will be immediately jailed. The Algerians sometimes for years. The expatriates for months and then deported, while in jail no one will know where you are for months, sometimes years.

There is only one person on the ballot, and the Algerian men are rounded up in a bus and taken to vote, they are watched as they cast their ballot. Women cannot vote, they are considered property.

My recommendation is that everyone gets either a passport or carries their birth certificate with them at all times, none of us will ever know if we might be pulled over under the incoming administration. They have already said there are to be mass deportations, which means stopping cars, searching homes and businesses as they please, and when food and other products become hard to get, they may be subject to confiscation, we don’t know do we?

Things are a bit different in voting in Algeria today, but not by much.