We are neither fear-mongers or prophets. We have fears and insights. The fears
come about because we have both experience and knowledge. The mind, in its supple days,
is able to cruise over a few thousand years with all the sight and sound beneath it
like a grand Disney ride. So, it's quite easy to say, "well, in two hundred years
America will go the way of the Roman Empire, break-down, break-up, be reclaimed by the
barbarians and then begin an upward struggle toward a new type of civilization." It may
happen and if we leave our bodies at death perhaps we see it. Our only fear would be
if the process were to start on our watch, in our time, right now or in a few years.
That is something we'd find disturbing. The very young and the very old seem to have this fear the most.
And it wouldn't shock us if two hundred years
from now we have a vital, free, exciting nation that still adheres to the Constitution
and shows any number of wonderful projects that were seeded in our own stubborn brains.
It occurs to us that wars exist because each side has its reasons to do what it does.
And the one entity that relents out of a transcendent sense of humanity is crushed and
rolled over.
Our fears for the 21st century are very stark and simple:
- The wrathful weapons will get more efficient, easier to produce, more portable.
- America will have to take over or control the Middle-East to keep complete tabs
on the terrorists that arise in that region.
- That China will emerge as the new super-power and we will return to a bipolar world
that replaces Russia with China.
- That America will get increasingly divided between a critical mass of superstitious,
ignorant people who believe in themselves and tightly organized elite's who run things
and believe in themselves.
- That America will become like the brittle but powerful corporation that resists
change rather than embracing and using change to keep its dynamis going.
Posted November 12, 2003
Posted January 12, 2004
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David Eide
eide491@earthlink.net
copyright 2003
March 27, 2003