The world is a (large) book (with small print!).  Those who do not travel read but the first page...  This has been one of those years of extreme highs and lows for me; an earthquake double dipper of emotions and experiences.  Some of it I would love to stop and re-do a few hundred times...some I would not want to revisit for any price.  Through it all I do my damnedest to wring out the moments and live them as they are fast pitched at me.  I have had a lot of those years.  I think there are a lot of people who would look back over their lives and pick 2001 as the year where the changes were the most dramatic.  Kind of like December of 1941;  the world took an abrupt turn in the river of change we all consider to be normal.  But looking back with a greater historical perspective it begs the question of the inevitability of the change.  Looking back most people agree we would have been involved in WWII sooner or later.  The history of the last 10 years and especially of the last few beg the same conclusion. 

10 years ago today I was at one of the most wonderful gatherings in my life in Muggleheim Germany (Berlin).  10 years ago tomorrow the world changed.   Certainly September 11th was a cathartic event.  It marks a point of change; a major turning point in the history of the United States and in the world.  But was it the event itself or the forces that had built up around it that caused the change?  Were we knocked off course or was the turn merely accelerated?

I have worked in the airlines for many years now.  It is a difficult industry to be in... and if there is a metaphor I can loosely use to describe it, the industry is at the "top of the food chain" in an economic sense.  If something happens to disrupt the economic environment of the world people immediately stop planning vacations... companies cut travel budgets and the thin margins of airlines immediately evaporate.  Layoffs, bankruptcies and industrial churn follow. 

I remember walking out of a morning operations review at an airline I used to work for in July of 2001.  As usual we were picking apart the impact of weather and equipment outages and the thousands of things that can mess up an airline's ability to get customers from where they are to where they want to be with their bags when they said they would get them there.  With all the "sweat equity" we had eked out a barely profitable year and I turned to the VP of flight operations ad said something like, "You better remember today...these are the good old days".  It got a laugh... But in the backrooms and analytical enclaves of the company there were plans to deal with what we knew was inevitable.  There were projections, probabilistic curves and stochastic simulations of ever imaginable scenario and the outcomes all pointed to doom.  The only question was "how bad"? The destination was pretty clearly known how we were going to get there was the only question.

The seeds of "the Arab Spring" were sown in the aftermath of the second world war and before.  Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is more like the moving of a Teutonic plate grinding the schemes of politics and the machinations of CEOs beneath it.

The only real question is whether the great exodus of America's wealth has done anything to improve the journey.  I think that the destination is fairly well know.  The world has to develop a world economy (and I will not get into what happens if we don't succeed). Have we improved our lot by creating more complex economies in India, China and Indonesia?  Clearly the billions we have dumped  into some of the worlds economies have helped in the their economic development.  But has it accelerated the real development of a world economy that will benefit the citizens of the USA?  Will the rest of the world come to our aid now that we have hawked everything in the USA to the Chinese?  I think if Adam Smith were here he would be telling me "Well... it doesn't work that way..." 

Four days after September 11th we boarded a plane in Frankfurt; finally able to get back to the USA.  We went through three security checkpoints and a final passport check from a German Army Intelligence Officer just before we boarded.  After a bunch of questions and some conversation about the attacks he handed me back my passport and said "Well, I am very sorry about how they hurt your country.  Now... maybe you will grow up". 

So does anyone think our "grown up" response made a difference?