The tipping point

It seems like every year for the past 3-4 years (that i can recall), I feel like the stakes just keep getting higher. From the War, to climate change, to the breakdown of our financial markets, to my own life there is less and less room for error and folly. This recent article by Thomas Friedman does a great job of explaining the very serious consequences of allowing ourselves to forget how important this time is.

It is a common feature of history that every generation believed itself to be the turning point of civilization or the "one." For example, talk to enough religious folks and you will find that we are in the End Times and all the global issues we face today are just signs of the beginning of the end. But, humor me for just a minute. What if all those generations were right? What if they all really were in the End Times, just not at the very, very end of it? What if the "end" is a two thousand year-long ending? What if we are getting closer to the actual end? December 21, 2012 ring a bell???

I know, you're probably thinking that I am just perpetuating the cycle, and maybe I am, but it's hard not to think of this time "a" tipping point at the very least, and "the" tipping point at the most. I don't think that the end of the world, in the physical sense, is ten of fifteen years away, but I do think that a foundational shift is occurring in human history that will determine how successive generations will live and view the world. 

Like the fashion world where trends reemerge every 20-30 years, so will humankind's worldview reemerge from some period in the past where we had not yet reached the End, hopefully.