The World Waits for No Country
NEW YORK – The United States finds itself confronting several daunting challenges simultaneously. There is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already claimed nearly 120,000 lives and shows little sign of abating in large swaths of the country. The economic impact has been devastating, with some 40 million currently out of work and the Federal Reserve projecting that many of them will remain unemployed for a prolonged period.
On top of all this is the explosion of protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year old African-American man, at the hands – more precisely, the knee – of a policeman in Minneapolis. The protests, which have spanned the country, highlighted not just the enduring problem of deep-seated racism in the US, but also of police behavior, which all too often is violent and outside the law that those wearing uniforms have sworn to uphold.
It comes as no surprise that the American public and their elected officials have focused their energies on these domestic challenges. The problem is that much is happening in the world that calls out for American attention and is not getting it.
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