Thoughts.

In the end, the Rise of the Rest is still about the Rise of the Rest. Glenn Beck can shake (is there someone under his desk tazing him whenever he tries to make a point?) and ramble all he wants, politicians can rabble rabble rabble all they want and a Chinese farmer can sit in their Yangtze delta rice paddy as long as he or she likes, but the tides of change are a'swirlin' and nothing short of a nuclear holocaust can stop it.

There's a quote from a film (2008's Curious Case of Benjamin Button) that I've always liked but never really felt, i guess, until rather recently. "You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went. You could swear, curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you just have to let things go." America doesn't seem to want to let American hegemony go and it's understandable...No person (who happens to be a control freak) feels comfortable with giving up control. We're faced with two options that will shape how the final transition turns out. We can deny that there's 'a problem,' say that everyone else is the problem and try to redirect the tides of change (even for just a little while), or we can accept that we're living in a changing world and that, for the sake of stability and survival, we can make the best of it and do what we can to usher in this change smoothly.
For the last little while, we've been on what I feel is the wrong path...we've been trying to "stay the course" and maintain American hegemony (A good and lengthy example would be: launching a military adventure into an underdeveloped yet resource rich country in order to pull them from OPEC and then flood the market with their oil (cheaply), hopefully leading to a destabalization of OPEC and, under the pressures of Saudi debt, reduction of OPEC influence and control as a means of increasing American hegemony in the region for years to come...all the while, cracking open the country to the 'beauty' of the free-market for the purpose of maintaining hegemony and increasing the sphere of American influence...yup, that's what it was all about. I just blew your mind!)

This book is about taking a different path. It is about accepting what's going to come and trying to come up with solutions about what sort of positive things we can do about it. Going further, it's about preparedness and in order to be prepared we must understand and in order to do that, we must first discuss.

I found that Fareed laid the subject matter of this book out very clearly and in a very eloquent manor, discussed from a point of view that is truly worldly and relatively free of a Western bias. I do believe that this book will (and has) succeeded in the goal of bringing the topic of Post-Americanism out from the backrooms of policy advisors and into the homes of average Western citizens.

In regards to the class project itself, I have picked up two other books (The End of Oil by Paul Roberts and The Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Polan) that were also on the class list of reading material for this project and have been reading through them while working on this blog project for The Post-American World. I'm actually quite happy to find something within the Engineering cirriculum here at the ol' UofC that engages me on a level other than well, Engineering (Fluid Mech, Thermodynamics or other nerd stuff.) I found that writing the blog was far more time consuming than I expected it to be (and much more so than a book report would have been) and at times, I found it somewhat challenging to do. It is this challenge combined with the ability to express my own thoughts as they are that made this project so enjoyable to do.

I was speaking with a friend of mine about 'the Engg481 project' a while back and she shared a kernel of wisdom that a professor of hers had once shared with her: "A blog should be like a woman's skirt. Long enough to cover the goods, but short enough to keep you interested." It'd be pretty easy to say that, considering i've written a solid 6 pages of 10point font per chapter that I may have failed in that respect; however I don't think this is really the case. I feel that the content of this book is so important that if the ideas are not analyzed at length or discussed thoroughly, then you run the risk of losing out on the true message of the book. Over the last few years i've taken a heavy interest in economic theory as well as human psychology (specifically behaviour) and I have enjoyed analyzing the content of this book, both within this blog and unspoken, through an engineering lens as well as through the lens of my own interests. It's been a neat project, one that i've very much enjoyed doing (I already said that, but oh well.)

I don't think there's much more to it to say other than that...I thank you for bearing with me and reading through the length of my ramblings and all that. I'd also like to thank Marjan Eggermont for teaching this class and putting her own spin on things, I really enjoyed it.

-Darren.