"The world"

"The world," is often the answer I proffer when my wife asks me of the cause of my scowl. It's an all encompassing answer, and one which she offers reciprocally to my questions of concern.

I know it's important to keep one's cool, to lift the mind above the details of uptick rules, carbon emission standards, toxic assets, and national burn-on-burn politics (Grassley with the cross-over, Frank with the pump fake). Yet, from an altitude of perspective, things really do not look all that good. A few years ago, I could rise up and see a flattening of world sorrows from here to the horizon. This too shall pass away with time.

Now, though, all I can see is the churn. The world is changing, like it or not. The last great change like this began with the Great Depression and ran through the Korean War, with aftershocks in Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution, and the political troubles in Central America.

Demographically speaking, the pillars that kept the world aloft during the past eighty years are in a state of peril. Russia is shrinking. Europe's whites are grey, and the young are brown. America's immigration iteration takes us farther and farther away from Jefferson's plantation. People think of China as the next great power, but that is incorrect. Their population will age and decline dramatically in the next quarter century; the young are too male. China is hemmed in by nuclear powers -- it's army and national police will have no local imperial outlet. The threat or promise of a great Chinese power is overstated at best. Woe to be a Chinese peasant, though, at the mercy of a police state powered by a fiat economy.

Even without pillars, the world will stand. But it will be an ad hoc structure resembling bazaars in India or Brazil. Chaotic, inefficient places that somehow produce results.

Yet I fear for a world increasingly beholden to the third law of thermodynamics. I fear it because it's unknown and unfamiliar. I fear it because I have a child. As the churn grows and foments popular yearning for change, visions of calamity begin to take shape. To build a better world, which is what billions are now demanding, requires uprooting the weeds that threaten to choke off water and light. Those in power now will not relinquish their standing so easily. As the energies of billions coalesce, the vehicles of differences amongst the innumerable world tribes will crash against each other. I fear that inevitable friction -- and its sparks -- more than I fear whatever perfect world might result after the churn flattens down again.