Well, it's the last day of 2011.
As so often happens in the waning hours of a year, the TV news shows are packed with year-end synopses and best-of, worst-of and top-ten most-[blank] lists galore. Being somewhat of a retrospective kind of guy, it's a favorite time of the TV year for me.
There's no doubt that 2011 was a busy year for the world. It's always hard to diagnose the significance of events in close perspective; it takes awhile to let things sink in before true relevance crystallizes. Nevertheless, 2011 certainly seems to have had more than its fair share of major events.
There were earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires, floods, tornadoes, riots, political uprisings, economic meltdowns, political meltdowns, leadership changes, bad guys getting killed, wars, really famous people dying, and I'm sure lots of future-famous people being born. There was even a near-nuclear meltdown. Even though any given year has an assortment of all of these events (except maybe the nuclear meltdown thing), it's hard to say that 2011 was your typical run-of-the-mill year. It seemed a banner year of events by both quality and quantity measures.
Because of people's competitive nature, there's always a tendency to want to pick the single most important event of the year. This has always seemed a bit nonsensical to me. Categorization of events on a calendar basis is itself somewhat irrelevant, since time marches on independently of what the calendar or clock says.
Furthermore, prescribing importance of events always depends on your point of view. I'm sure the people of Fukushima would have a hard time agreeing that the Arab Spring was more important than the spring earthquake and tsunami that rocked northern Japan. Just as I'm sure the people that work at Apple have a hard time accepting anything as being bigger than the loss this year of Steve Jobs. Anyone who has ever lost a relative, or had a baby, would most likely point to those events as their most important of any given year. And of course, people from Wisconsin would probably vote that the Superbowl was the biggest event of the year.
So, I think I'll just consider 2011 to have been a fairly dynamic and super-charged 12-month rolling average. Maybe it's a sign of the times in which we live. Technology, which shapes much of how we experience things these days, has certainly reached a point where the pace of change seems to have outstripped our ability to keep up.
Or maybe we're just more aware of our times now. Although I'm sure people living during the early part of the twentieth century were just as disoriented with the changes happening then as we are now, at least there weren't millions of people yelling at you about it through Twitter.
Maybe global climate change actually is for-real, and today's crazy weather isn't just a part of a reoccurring cycle, but a shift of things to come. Maybe the political and economic institutions that have dominated for the past century or more have finally run their course, and we are indeed at an inflection point in history. Maybe the stability of certain things we used to take for granted (like American prosperity) was, in fact, an aberration, and now things are getting back to normal.
As always, time will tell...Happy New Year.
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