When we are born we have no idea of our times in the historical sense.  Looking back we can see that the end of the Cold War was a time of immense opportunity to recreate the world.  Yet embedded in that assumption is the naivete that the world wants to be great.  Unfortunately the world is still ruled by narrow and antagonistic interests, in a way a version (or perversion) of tribal sentiments.  Also the Cold War was just one heightened example of tension that greed permeates into the world.  The apparatus of the World Bank, IMF, CIA etc etc complex was well established and continuing on a remotely clandestine path of colonialism in the world.  Furthermore after the end of the Cold War the Military Industrial Complex was desperate for a new nemesis and the old racist specter of the Middle East was a good remedy.  So now we are into a new batch of endless wars led at the hands of the USA, the myth of the Free Republic has crumbled into the brutality of empire.  We fall again into historical amnesia, a supremely undereducated populace led around by the nose of a marketed consumerism predicated on unsustainable growth and ecological destruction.  The corporate media muses in inanity as the oligarchs gamble with their trillions instead of productively investing it to save the world.  Civilization teeters on the brink of food disaster, plague disaster, and authoritarian purges and internal civil implosions.  As the candle dims it appears we’ll need another crushing lesson via the idiocy of wars and/or severe depression and pain of nearly 10 billion human inhabitants to start an enlightened and hopeful, progressive conversation on civilization again.  The beat goes on, for how many hundreds of years will the same rhythm play?  We are novices at civilization, but by some miracle we may survive before using our technological sophistication as a tool to eliminate ourselves via the internal social savagery that we can not rid from our collective unconscious.