Fear and Self-Loathing in Europe

I have always been fascinated with Europe though I've never visited. I was one of those quiet kids that spent hours alone in my room reading in the World Book Encyclopedia about France and Germany, castles and the Alps, the Rhine and the Danube, Barcelona and Rome, the Great Wars (also numerous lesser ones) and just about anything that was Europe.

Its peoples were my ancestors and English is my tongue. There is a connectedness there that is easy to map yet difficult to understand in many ways because of the passage of time and the dynamics of culture and thought.

In just the years I've been alive I've seen our American culture shift and slide too, sometimes for the better and sometimes for ill. And yet I am proud of this swirling impressionist canvas that is America because I believe we are a good people though far from perfect. Some of our mistakes have been horrible, but our triumphs have been glorious!

My fascination with Europe has not changed. Now, however, it isn't the awe of its landscapes or the captivation of its historic cultures that keep my attentions across the Atlantic, but rather my dismay over how the Euro-situation could possibly have shifted so far akilter--and how the death knell that is clearly tolling over the continent is being heard by either too few that do care, or being heard by too many that simply do not.

Fjordman goes to painstaking effort to define and analyze what I think of as the European death wish in The Brussels Journal. It is a truly insightful essay.

This might very well be what happens to people that have totally lost touch with the idea that they are, indeed, worth saving.