EDITORIAL

This is the watershed of a new era. The destruction & disintegration we see on both the economic and political fronts is evidence of underlying tectonic movement. Old ways of seeing and thinking are being found out as inadequate. Social structures that offered security in the past no longer do so. The individual is exposed as never before to massive impersonal forces. The shift from global corporatism to state capitalism, albeit the Chinese one party model, the Russian 'organised crime' model or the neo-liberal type, is a growing dynamic trend, and would appear to be an event of a similar magnitude as the Black Death, with all the social restructuring that followed in its wake likely to be the case now. Meanwhile the threat of a mutated H1N1 virus lurks in the background, an X-factor to throw into the future mix.