Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.

I couldn’t agree more with the essay “Why America should care about the collapse of European Unity” by British historian Simon Schama. Read it first, but otherwise I will quote the last paragraphs:

Although it’s natural in brutally hard times to retreat back to tribal encampments encircled by walls of tariffs and fences against immigrants, this atomization of economic and political purpose needs to be resisted, on both sides of the Atlantic, if we are not to slide into another deep and dark age of violently angry populations and dangerously combative posturing.

Whether we like it or not, we are all—across the oceans and continents—entangled in a common destiny, perhaps more than ever in the entirety of the world’s history. We share the same predicament of a physically degraded planet; we are bound together—the Chinese bondholder and the American debtor; the Greek insolvent and the German banker—in the troubles of a common human home. Turning one’s back is not an option; it will merely guarantee that one day it will be stabbed by the mischief of history. To let the worst off sink is to make it harder for us all to swim. Better to hearken to John Donne: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent … If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were …; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls …”

You know the rest. Take it to heart.