A Multi-Polar World

Amazing article just published today in NYT on America's decline and the rise of Europe and China.

I have to say, it's hard to disagree with. When I read these articles, I get a pit-in-my-stomach feeling, wondering what life will be like for my (as of yet non-existent) children and grandchildren and their generations. Indeed, I wonder what life will be like for *myself* in twenty years, and how the US's shifting place in the world will change and constrain my own choices and opportunities.

But I have to think that a bit of competition in the world is a good thing at the end of the day.

Indeed, for the past few years, I've been noticing how lazy we in America have gotten as a country. I think we face a severe crisis of leadership-- a vacuum of morality in which the original ideals upon which the country was built have gotten lost in the games that people play to advance their own private gains. Winning has become more important than doing what's right. And in the process, we've come to simply expect certain privileges as a country (and as individual citizens), forgetting that those privileges were hard-earned by previous generations and easily susceptible to loss.

Maybe a little competition will remind us what we have to lose. Maybe it will flatten out a bit of the arrogance that is slowly eating away at the substance of the country I was raised to be proud of.

Such competition, by the way, was inevitable. Americans have no monopoly on talent and innovation. And thank goodness.

But we have a choice about how we react to the competition. It can do us in, or it can be an immense opportunity for regeneration.