We live in a world that at times seems to be crumbling beneath us, slowly suffocating from the pollution, wars and grinding poverty that blanket much of the planet.
The crisis in Darfur screams soundlessly into the abyss that is television news. Attempts to censor the Internet are blossoming everywhere, and a federal investigation recently found that six of eight reconstruction ""successes"" in Iraq are actually failures. Meanwhile, the world waves a languid hand at the problems and settles back to sleep.
Then again, Paris Hilton just got sentenced to 45 days in jail, so maybe there is some justice in the world after all. More importantly, countries around the globe are beginning to shake up the conventional way of doing things in an attempt to create something different.
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is leading the charge to wrest Latin America from the sweaty grip of corporate American and European interests.
By allying himself with Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Haiti, he has created what is called the Bolivarian Alternative for the People of the Americas. Designed to establish ""fair trade"" instead of ""free trade"" throughout the Americas, the goal is to create a system in which countries help each other by supporting education, housing and health care instead of purely business interests.
Financed in large part by Venezuela's massive petroleum resources, the alliance truly gives new hope to the struggle against the corporate empire.
Chavez has revealed he has a totalitarian streak in him, and some of his proposals should send warning flares out over the horizon.
However, with the alliance in its infancy, it is too soon to tell which side of his agenda will prove victorious.
An increasing number of countries across Central and South America are making the plunge into the seemingly bottomless well of human hope, and their buoyant optimism is enough to justify giving the venture a chance to revolutionize political and economic life in the region.
Elsewhere, the trend continues. Nations in the South Pacific have united to restrict the environmentally disastrous fishing technique of ""bottom trawling,"" in which heavy nets are dragged across the ocean floor, destroying coral reefs and suffocating marine life with clouds of sediment and debris. A quarter of the world's oceans are now protected.
The agreement is an attempt to establish a precedent of safeguarding the Earth against corporate interests, a reflection of Chavez's attempts to place the people of Latin America ahead of their economies.
A common assumption these days is that the American system is best and it's only a matter of time before the rest of the world follows suit.
Some view that assumption positively and others negatively, but the inevitability of a worldwide American way is a common concession in our current political and economic discourse.
And yet, once more the winds of change are stirring, and other countries are boldly going where no one has gone before.
The end of their road may see them right back in dictatorships and with Wal-Marts, but seeing them stretching outward is invigorating. Who knows? Maybe in 50 years it will be Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Way that seems omnipresent.
People haven't stopped trying to make the world a better place, even when faced with impossible odds.
One definition of insanity may indeed be the perpetual repetition of an action with the expectation of a different result, but in this case I've never been happier to call humanity crazy.
