Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Your Creepy Thought of the Day

... brought to you by the letter Y.

As in why, oh why did I have to read this gem?

We face a choice. We could allow this crisis to start a retreat from globalisation.

As some want, we could close our markets - for capital, financial services, trade and for labour - and reduce the risks of globalisation, but that would reduce global growth, deny us the benefits of global trade, and confine millions to global poverty.

Or we could view the threats and challenges we face today as the difficult birth pangs of a new global order, and our task now as nothing less than making the transition through a new internationalism to the benefits of an expanding global economy, not muddling through as pessimists but making the necessary adjustment to a better future and setting new rules for this new global order. (Found in various places - here is one source.)
- British PM Gordon Brown.
I like the phrases "a new global order" and "a new internationalism" best.

Somewhere out there, there is a man, a woman, a family packing up the house to move permanently to the cottage, the mountains, the bomb shelter. I almost wish I were moving with them.

- V.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Creepy indeed. Like you, it makes me want to disappear into the forest, as it were. But with today's satellite technology there really is nowhere to escape notice.

Perhaps our best teachers in this coming brave new world would be the old line dissidents and practicing Christians of the former Soviet Union and other such regimes. And not just for the moral and spiritual fortitude with which they endured, but the practical advice about networking and the art of hiding in plain sight.

They had one thing that we may not have, however. That is an outside world. Under global tyranny there is no outside world.