Dog Days

These are those well known dog days of summer, I suppose. I've begun more than a dozen posts prior to this one, but stopped when the tone grew too dark even for me. It's strange to blame my mood on the summer, because I enjoy these warm months of sunshine, much preferring the heat and brightness to the cold and dark of winter. But this has been a hard summer for the world. And it's been a hard time to be an American.

It occurs to me that perhaps these are also the dog days of the American century that began a little more than a hundred years ago. These days we're seeing the limits of our power more and more frequently, and so is the rest of the world. We may find ourselves in that uncomfortable position that our friends in Britain and Europe found themselves in as they realized when it was probably much to late, that they were no longer the rulers of the world. Their empires were shrinking, and they were increasingly at the mercy of global forces beyond their power to control.

Or maybe it's just that time of year again, and everything will be better soon. After all, after summer comes the fall. Or in this case maybe I should say autumn.