Failure Is the Only Option. Again.

People are afraid of outbursts of violence, after the shootings in Tuscon, and elsewhere. They fear a large scale civil war.

I think they may be wrong.

Violence won't improve anything, it will simply add to the misery. Most Americans agree on this, I believe. What will change things is economic failure. The federal debt limit crisis coming up this spring may well be *the* crisis moment. Maybe.

We will be reduced to the state of an ordinary nation. Humiliating, but not fatal. How long this will take, and the emotional carnage wrought, is still unknown. Britain after WW 2, not Somalia or Afghanistan is the example (though the South/rural areas might be worse).

The Chinese are in for their own moment of comeuppance. They cannot create enough consumer demand with the great disparities in wealth between rural and urban populations. The Chinese are outsourcing to Thailand, et al, before employing their own citizens. This is not how you create a consumer society. India is a little, but not much, better off.

We will be competing against a huge labor pool, with diminishing economic and military power. No number of Glock's can fix this. Glock's cannot put out fires, or provide medical care, or provide the public services, and sense of community needed to address our own problems. We ourselves will have to do this, as part of our national 12 step program.

It will take one to two generations, minimum.