Tuesday, November 23, 2010

The thought thought round the world?

My son, home just in from college for Thanksgiving this evening, is preoccupied with a paper he has to turn in tomorrow morning. In a ten-minute dinner, we talked mainly about paper-writing. Then I asked him if he'd read/heard about the North Korean bombardment of a South Korean island. He said, "Yeah, I hear we may be all drafted." I said, "When I heard the news this morning, I wondered what people thought when they first heard that some prince had been shot in Sarajevo." He said, "I thought the same thing."

I wonder how many people around the world had that same thought today, when they heard that North Korea had shelled a South Korean island. While the world as a whole grows richer apace, that August 1914 feeling keeps growing. In the west, at any rate.

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