The Big One?

Beginning with the Crusades a thousand years ago, the incursion of the West into other civilizations—the Americas, Africa, the Muslim world, China, and yes, even Hawaii—has had catastrophic results for indigenous peoples: the decimation of native American peoples by the White Man’s microbes; the enslavement of millions of Africans on the cane and cotton plantations of the Americas; the humiliation of China and Islam. With all that, is the West now poised to reap the consequences of what historians call “blowback”? Does the wholesale loss of American jobs represent the beginning of the painful adjustment that the West must make to the global economy? With two out of three people in the world living on less than a dollar a day—and given that violence is the last resort of the helpless--will the War on Terror widen into a war between the Haves and the Have-Nots? Do the events of 9-11 mark the Great Divide between all that came before in the past thousand years, and all that is to come?