And here I am in my clean, white shirt,
With a little money in my pocket and a nice warm home.

I made some pasta tonight because I think the kids need to carb up.  They have been doing tennis and swimming during the day and swimming at night.  We ate well and I turned on the telly to catch a little news before we head out for the swim lessons.  The news channels went into commercial break so I surfed a little.  I knew that History Channel was running Band of Brothers and I wanted to see where they were.

It is the episode where Easy Company discovers a concentration camp.  I turned it on just at the point where they find the camp and open it up.  The inmates come toward them.  One of them is carrying a dying man.

It hit me.  I started to cry.  “Never again” I said, as if I could somehow keep that kind of evil from happening.  I started to sob.  I felt hopeless when I thought about the evil that had swept across Europe in the Thirties.  I kept saying “Never again”, but I also knew that there wasn’t a lot that I could do about it.  I felt hopeless in a way that I haven’t felt for a long time.

Clean white shirt is about having a lot of needs met and looking around to see what there is that I can do in the world.  Darfur?  Out of reach.

You drive three miles from all this prosperity
Down across the river and you see a ghetto there
And we got children walking around with guns
And they got knives and drugs and pain to spare
And here I am in my clean white shirt
With a little money in my pocket and a nice warm home
And we got teenagers walkin’ around in a culture of darkness
Livin’ together alone.
And I can’t explain it and I can’t understand
But I’ll come down and get my hands dirty and together we’ll make a stand.

Make a stand is how I feel right now.  Yackers yacking on the telly, trying to make people mad.  I’ve had enough of that crap.

I may have a clean white shirt, but I’m going to get it dirty.

And here I am in my clean, white shirt,
With a little money in my pocket and a nice warm home

The article is the Failed States Index at Foreign Policy.

Yemen may not yet be front-page news, but it’s being watched intently these days in capitals worldwide. A perfect storm of state failure is now brewing there: disappearing oil and water reserves; a mob of migrants, some allegedly with al Qaeda ties, flooding in from Somalia, the failed state next door; and a weak government increasingly unable to keep things running. Many worry Yemen is the next Afghanistan: a global problem wrapped in a failed state.

It’s not just Yemen. The financial crisis was a near-death experience for insurgency-plagued Pakistan, which remains on imf life support. Cameroon has been rocked by economic contagion, which sparked riots, violence, and instability. Other countries dependent on the import and export of commodities—from Nigeria to Equatorial Guinea to Bangladesh—had a similarly rough go of it last year, suffering what economist Homi Kharas calls a “whiplash effect” as prices spiked sharply and then plummeted. All indications are that 2009 will bring little to no reprieve.

Instead, the global recession is sparking fears that multiple states could slip all at once into the ranks of the failing.

The world my children will live in is one ripe for the wars we thought were too big to happen.  Multiple failed states, fractionalization, independent players intent on expansion; it’s a recipe for another world war.  The countries listed in this report form a band that starts in Equatorial Africa and goes east, across Asia.  The transition to economies that are not dependent on Middle East oil which will happen around the middle of this century will be rough.  These countries all have high birth rates and failed political systems.  They can’t feed the people they have now.

I’m sitting in my clean shirt and there isn’t much I can do about it.  But maybe my kids can.