If History teaches us anything, it is that there never is a return to “normal”.

Sometimes it’s major events, like the US Civil War, the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, WWI, but other times societies just slowly disintegrate — the Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire come to mind.

I’m pretty sure none of us here will ever see the world return to what it was in the last decade of the 20th century. In retrospect, Obama’s Presidency may come to look like, say, Marcus Aurelius’ reign, a short, peaceful rest stop on an inevitable path of decline.