2 years have passed since I heard this story.
I was drinking with my colleague and our sales representative in Kyushu, and this sales guy got the message in Keitai from his wife, which says “a jet plane crashed into NY city”. I didn’t get panicked, nor surprised. I guess I couldn’t imagine what it is like at all. But my stomach got slightly heavy and some omnious feeling crept in that finally the “sign” that the world has changed fundamentally had come.
Watching all the news coverage made that feeling stronger. It is not that the world started to change after that incident, rather the world has been changing fundamentally, and that was one of the consequence (although it could have been much less tragic).
What is changing in what way? There’s a lot, but the most serious phenomenon is the seperation between haves and have-nots. It is everywhere – the North and the South, the employed and the unemployed, the star soccor players and all the others, and so on. Only a handful of winners take everything, and the rest can barely survive in ever-worsening conditions. It is as if we are going back to the days of pre-WWII.
On the other hand, I started to witness another wave of change from a year ago. The emergence of the power of individuals, through the world of weblogs and entrepreneurs. Now we do have the most free days of our lives – the freedom of choice and thinking. Indeed in most cases they are still practically illusions, but at least we have succeeded in taken the limit off inside our mind. We can, “think” of doing what we want and actually “learn” how to achieve it. Of course it was still able to do it 20 years ago, but how easy was it in those days?
The curious thing is, this two contradicting incidents are seemingly occuring from the same reason – the advance of technology, especially that of the Internet. What will the world be when this current turmoil settles down? I guess, people will be divided in levels. Not in the traditional cultural context, but in an intellectual context. 1. People who have chances 2. People who look for chances 3. People who doesn’t know about chances. Basically people are divided in 1 and 3, a few will come out of 1 or 3 and becomes 2. 2 is a temporary level and those people will eventually become 1 or 3.
The more easier you can cross the boundary between these 3 levels (in has to be in both direction), the world will be a better place, but I am rather pessimistic about this. It is increasingly getting easy to fall from 1 to 3, but very difficult for the other way around. At least, I would like to stay in 1 and help people who are struggling in 2, like me now.