When you’re on a speeding bullet train, and your eyes are closed, you mightn’t even know you’re moving. In these situations, you always need to be aware of a background, to get a perspective on what’s really going on with you. You gotta have your eyes open. Something like this happens to all of us as we move in the current of history – but our eyes are closed, and we’re missing the massive changes that are hurling our world into a new dawn.
Just take the seismic changes in the world order that’s been put into play just this week – without even garnering a comment in our newspapers. Your Eyewitness had mentioned that the leaders of the BRICS grouping were meeting – but yet the war in Ukraine kept us transfixed. Imagine China and India, with two and a half billion people, making plans with Russia, Brazil, and South Africa – and we’re only worried about Ukraine with 44 million!! Not that 44 million people aren’t important, but let’s have that perspective!!
Just the other day, India’s Foreign Minister was asked about their seeming nonchalance about the Ukraine War. His answer was surprising to most who’d gotten used to keeping their eyes closed: “Europe should stop insisting that what’s important to them is automatically important to the rest of the world!!” If we’re all humans, and equally so, by that criterion then, we should all be as important! But we know that ain’t so, don’t we??
And this brings us back to BRICS and their importance. They’ve just concluded their fourteenth meeting, and issued their communique on agreements reached. Their theme had been, “Foster High-quality BRICS Partnership, Usher in a New Era for Global Development”, and boy, did they take that seriously.
Let’s take the financial architecture that we still think makes the world go around – the World Bank and the IMF that was formed by the West, and is still controlled by them – after WWII. Well, the BRICS countries have moved a long way in creating a basket of their currencies to use as a reserve for world trade. And let’s not forget – after the first meeting, they’d created their own development bank!!
And BRICS has decided to get bigger – brick by brick!! Does it look as if Argentina will be next in their club: BRICAS?? They’ve also enlarged the number of countries they coordinate their programmes with: A “BRICS Plus” virtual conference was held as part of the main meeting, with ministers from countries that included the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Argentina, Nigeria, Senegal, and Thailand. WOW!!
There’s a brave new world opening up – and we’d better pay attention. If nothing else, it’ll be more competitive.
And that’s always a good thing, no??
…in America
Now, let’s take a deep breath and look at what’s going on in America, shall we?? Did you, dear reader, ever think we could’ve had an insurrectionary raid on capitol Hill – the home of American Democracy?? Jeez!! Since 1776, they were the City on the Hill, to which the rest of the world looked up as a beacon! But can we reconcile that vision with all that’s gone down in just the last decade? A President who tweeted his announcements on domestic and foreign policy at night – unmediated by a million-strong bureaucracy created to serve the Republic??
A Supreme Court that created the principle of Judicial Review as a bulwark against an always potentially tyrannical Executive – now using that power on behalf of an Executive that practised rampant judicial bench stacking?? So what now happens about the separation of powers – which is supposed to be sacrosanct – when both Houses and the Court’s gonna toe one line??
This will not end well!!
…for more guns
Following a spate of traditional mass shootings that claimed dozens of lives in troubled, violence-prone, gun-strewn, Far Northwestern banana-exporting Republic of the US, their Supreme Court in the coastal capital of Washington DC struck down gun laws as “undermining” American culture!!
