The Zeros

The Zero's are over. It's an used century now. I wouldn't call it a lost decade so far (as some magazines wrote). But it's definitely a decade of loss. We started to loose freedom, because we are full of fear and allowed them to remove our freedoms, we started to loose faith in our governments, as they did what we've allowed them.

We've gone trough the dot.com bubbles burst, we've gone through the financial crisis, yet another round of oil price shocks. The consequences of the finanical crisis will be the overarching topic of the next decade. And then there will be yet another round of oil price shocks. We have more problems than we are likely to solve: Climate Change, two wars showing us, that despite the capability to project power on a global scale doesn't mean that applying power on a global scale is a sensible choice, a economical crisis started by greed and the capability of a few to take the many as hostages ... "to big to fail" is nothing else than taking hostages at large scale..

Nevertheless this decade isn't lost. It shows limits, it shows the borders of our current behavior. Thus best consequence of the last decade is the loss of arrogance. 10 years before, climate change wasn't really a topic for the masses. Today everybody knows a little bit about it. We learned that terrorism is a threat and that we can't hope to modify the world to fit our concepts without having to fear a counter reaction of the people, whose live is altered by the will of greed 10.000 km away.

We have a task for the next decade: Learning. Learning that we can't force anybody into our will, or way to look the world: Terrorism is a result of arrogance. It's the natural counter reaction to arrogance. Learning that we have to double our efforts to rescue the world, when others don't want to instead of just pointing to others as an excuse for doing nothing: Just because China doesn't want to do nothing in regard of climate, that isn't an excuse for us. We have to learn that greed is the prelude to disaster.

You can summarize this all: We have to learn that we are responsible for all the things we do. When we act globally, we can't be responsible just locally. When we learned just this from the last decade, it can't be a lost decade.