It’s easy to wonder whether humanity has simply grown weary of life.
* Yesterday I noted the [inhumanity of Christmas shoppers](https://hennessysview.com/2010/11/28/our-disordered-society/) on Black Friday.** For the past 24 hours, the world has watched the slow release of hundreds of thousands of [classified US diplomatic cables](https://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/sc-dc-1130-wikileaks-20101129,0,2557036.story).** As I write, [a gunman holds hostages](https://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/11/29/wisconsin.hostage/?hpt=T2) at a rural Wisconsin high school.** The [European debt crisis](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/11/29/europes_ominous_reckoning_108078.html) refuses to remain quiet beneath the rug under which it’s been swept.** The US government is about to [unleash tyrannical control](https://biggovernment.com/tslagle/2010/11/29/washington-set-to-control-your-light-switch/) over all of our lives through bureaucratic fiat.
These are mostly American issues, but we are are smart to remember that the USA is one nation among many. Our problems, as Rick Blaine might say, don’t amount to a hill of beans when the whole world is collapsing around us.
Walter Russell Mead’s blog post (h/t RealClearPolitics.com) reminds us that we are not witnessing a normal business cycle.
There are times when the ideas of the world’s rulers and the institutions through which they govern are adequate to the needs of the era, and there are times–like the present–when they are not. It is not just the Obama administration that seems mentally and even culturally unprepared to understand much less to guide the events now sweeping through the world. In Brussels, Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo and Delhi — to say nothing of Washington – leaders seem equally clueless, equally committed to outmoded, inaccurate approaches to the issues of our time.
Sobering.
Mr. Mead’s analysis is far more important than the Wikileaks. The unconscionable, but unspectacular, information found in the document dump by the degenerate international fugitive Julian Assange is a symptom of civilization’s unraveling, not a cause.
The world needs leaders. America’s special place on the world stage demands we send forth a special leader—one who rises above the others, but who does so humbly. America’s blessing bring burdens of world leadership, not the privilege of world domination.
Our next president must enter office with the tacit understand of our greatness, and an open-eyed acceptance of risks. It’s not exaggeration to say the world is on the brink of a new dark age. We are one rogue nuke away from an unthinkable regression. While that would delight the environmentalist left, it cause massive human death. It would threaten many species, not just our own. Desperate, dying people couldn’t care less about nature. They care about living.
As we pause for Advent and the new year, think about whom you would trust to lead in such precarious times. Who can guide, not just America, but the world between the threats civilization face?
Ronald Reagan is dead. Margaret Thatcher is elderly. The cast of the G20 are pygmies posing as serious men and women. The next great American leader, if one remains, must rise from among us.
Choose carefully. But choose. Don’t let the pygmy farmers choose for you.