Quoted:Interesting times my friends, interesting times indeed.
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That is the gist of the famous Chinese curse (besides the Wu-Flu): "May you live in interesting times"
Personally I do not look at the collapse of a country and/or its civilization to be a bad thing. It has been going on for as long as there have been civilizations and yet humans are still around and we continued to advance. I try to imagine what life on this planet would be like if ancient Egypt had not collapsed and was still running the known world. What if the Roman Empire kept plugging along and we still had Caesar's still based in Rome along with their corruption? 250 years is a good run for a country but as one sees, it dies from the inside out. The endless creation of new rules, regulations, etc. that stifle progress and make it harder and harder to get things done. It was interesting to see that right after WW II, and the collapse of the Third Reich, Europe rebuilt at an incredibly fast pace. How did they do it? Easy. The old bureaucracies, bureaucrats, rules and regulatory agencies were all wiped out in the war. They had a clean slate to work with and no one around demanding 10 years of environmental impact studies, minority setasides and cultural studies. They cleared out the rubble and rebuilt. When I visited Germany in 1971 as a child, what stood out to me was how new everything was (except for various cultural buildings that the Allies worked hard to not bomb). My grandfather explained to me that everything I saw was new because the old stuff was all destroyed.