For me, the artificial anxiety Iused to experience after watching ascary movie has been fully replaced by areasonable existential fear evoked by the calm voice of the newscaster, especially if the news report that is being read begins with words like: ,,President Bush“… or ,,American“… . These words have the power to provoke, somewhere in my associative mind, worries about the future of our world.

Not that there haven‘t been any superpowers in the past. We have seen Rome and the Habsburg empire and Napoleon‘s empire all arrogant in their greatness and all overthrown. The ancient Romans used to think the end of Rome would mean the end of the world. But it would have been difficult to achieve the end of civilisation by spears and swords. The worrying fact about our times is that bringing the world to aswift end has been made technically possible. There will always be aman on some place on the globe claiming his nation to be ,,the Greatest nation of the world“ such was the recent statement of President Bush about the Americans. This becomes frightening in that very instant, when such astatement is not simply astrategic political move to encourage the citizens‘ selfconfidence, but alifestyle which no one can and no one dares to oppose to.

America has managed to build up for herself an extremely solid base ground. The US invests the most out of all into UN budgets. The state of California, alone, is on the sixth place in the list of areas with the greatest production in terms of financial progress, right between Great Britain and France whom we regard as European superpowers. It has the arsenal to cause the end of the human race and the defence system to exclude itself from such acatastrophe. Not only is there no single state that could equal the US in terms of military or economic strenght, no union of nations could stand up against the US, because she has managed to interconnect states and make them dependant on her economy. Therefore, going against the US would be going against yourself.

This situation along with the open manifestations of American selfconfidence (envious souls might call this selfconfidence ,,arrogance“) certainly is adisturbing factor and the question remaining is whether US politicians are cautious and sensible enough to handle the power they posess. Idon‘t know about you, but the awareness that the safety of the world lies in the hands of one man and his cabinet and that due to the peacemaking processes, thousands may not live to see the spring, is certainly MAKING me TROUBLED.

Katarína KOPAJOVÁ

(Competition in English Essays, Category Anglophones, 1st Place)