The Room Do I dare disturb the universe?

The Grand French Decline

The Grand French Decline

Summertime, and living is not easy for French racked with self-doubt

The question becomes, is this a problem that is fundemental to the French? I’ve lived in two distinct cultures recently, and found they both are questioning themselves in the lights of the new world.

Britan (especially Scotland) seems to share the same sense of loss as the French in the change in geo-political power. The Commonwealth is a poor substitue for the Empire, though the younger British I don’t think care so much.

While America is still a reigning power (as proven recently by our ability to start a fight with people who didn’t even have a gun), we’re starting to see themes of paranoia and impotence. Many of us would like to lick our wounds, and start to heal, many of us would like to strike out and police the world as a super power should. What we seem to be doign is lashing out like a tempermental child. this latter reality is (I think) spurned by the same sense of decline that mirrors the French and British.

So really, who’s in decline? Is it the French? The English? Or really the so called first world?

Face it, our fears are that our jobs are being shipped to “third world” countries. We find that global companies are going to do what global companies do and farm out cheap work to the cheapest labor. We find our sense of cultural identity and self being shattered by a seemingly increased churn in global relocation (everybody is upset about beign flooded by refugees forigners immigrents (legal and illegal)) and there appears to be little end in sight.

What seems to be happening in reality is market forces are forcing a grand realignment of the glocal economy. Someone should seek out what happens in other times of economic upheavel to those who “have”, and those who are about to have. Like the rise of the Merchant class in the middle ages, and the rise of the Industrial during the Industrial Revolution.

These stories I think will chart a path to where we’ll end up in a few years, but I doubt anybody will read them correctly to know the path before we get there.