"We are at an economic crossroad; things can still be changed, but it takes vision and fortitude, especially since the solutions are not only difficult but unpopular.
Across the span of history, there have been many instances when increasingly desperate political men gambled their own nation and lost. Just as numerous have been the times when desperate men, with the fate of their nation on the line, led it into external war in order to avoid telling people inside their own nation that they had neither the means nor the money nor the arms with which to gain their publicly stated aims. In almost every case, having led their nation into war, these men lost their nation.
But while political regimes rise and fall, peoples and nations remain. Greece is still there, after more than 3500 years of history, beginning even before the Siege of Troy. Rome is still there, as the capital of today's Italy, even if Italy as a nation was a creation of the late eighteenth century in political terms. France, after so many Kings and Republics is still there, created from the small Germanic tribe of the Francs parked at the Isle de Paris in the Seine. And look across the Middle East. Look from Assyrians to Persians to the Ottomans and to the Arabs themselves. They are all still there, as peoples, even if their borders and their political regimes have changed countless times. Regimes rise or fall - peoples endure.
The central point of the historic human tragedy is that much too often, political men have gambled for some ephemeral renown and glory in their own time, only to leave the people who lifted them to their exalted position to climb out from under the ruins they caused.
The people may not and usually do not know what caused the ruins, but they always climb out of them. Peoples endure and establish real nations after having been destroyed by military and political means. They rise again and again in a near timeless fashion. Poland shows this. So does modern Germany, which has been physically destroyed twice in less than a century.
It is long past time to end this long known tragic sequence. War as a "solution" to problems is obsolete. It is in the face of this fact that President Bush has to decide whether to "gamble" the United States. |
