Revolutionary Wealth

I only caught a little bit of this on Book TV, and apparently it was a re-run. I have to confess that I haven't read any of Toffler's work yet, so I'm not endorsing his conclusions, but I did find the portion of the conversation I watched to be thoughtful and thought-provoking. If the U.S. really is spearheading a new civilization and way of life, and I believe that it is, I wish more Americans would consider what they want our historic legacy to be; will history remember us as just another empire that succumbed to selfish materialism and the arrogance of power, or will it remember us as something more, something nobler and better?

Stop apologizing to the Moslem world

This editorial captures some the frustration I feel about our approach to the Islamic world. Among the many mistakes this administration has made, one of the most baffling is its belief that it must flatter and cajole Moslems to get them to embrace Western-style democracy and values. The fact is, while there are many good Moslems in the world, their religion as it is practiced in most of the world today is inimical to our form of government and our values, not to mention modernity as a whole. Western civilization is by no means perfect, but it doesn't need to keep apologizing to Moslems or obsessively worry about upsetting their feelings. The problems in the Middle East have much less to do with mistakes made by the West than they do with deep-seated cultural and religious problems inherent to their societies. The sooner we stop pretending otherwise the better. Let them worry about how the rest of the world perceives them.