On the morning of September 15th, 2008 I awoke in my hotel room in Prague feeling quite cheerful. An early autumn morning in Prague will do that to you, so despite this being my 47th birthday I felt good and then I switched on CNN. In New York it was the early hours of Monday morning and news was filtering out that Lehman Brothers was filing for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch was being bought (or was it rescued?) by Bank of America.
It all sounded rather surreal as I gazed out over the grand old city before me. My mind flashed back to another birthday seven years earlier when my 40th fell four days after 9/11 and I had just managed to return home to Ohio after being stranded in LA for three days. While one cannot compare the financial losses of 2008 with the human losses of 2001 and the sacrifices of so many soldiers since, it does give further support to the fact that we live in a world where extraordinary events are now quite normal. Through some combination of arrogance, anger, greed, and stupidity mounting pressures are ignored only for them to explode with devastating results. Just as technology has connected the world is their some hope that technology can allow us to communicate more effectively and release tension before it all gets out of hand?
I suspect it can - if we let it.
Comments