When the World Changed

Sometimes the key indicators of changes are easy to see and sometimes they aren’t. This wasn’t always so. Before our connected world, before we all carried mobile telephony constantly, and when our Facebook status didn’t derive our mood, we lived in a world where change seemed to happen as a series small or very large earthquakes. It would be still for some extended period, then something major would happen and it would alter our world. These days the ground shakes almost constantly beneath us, and we’ve almost ceased to notice the movement and motion it creates.

My first memory of an earth-changing moment happened when I was very young, and I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon’s surface. Indeed it was one small step for man, and a giant leap for mankind. With that simple act, we moved without doubt beyond our own world, and opened a new frontier. It was a seminal moment for our race – something the new iWhatever doesn’t necessarily rate highly against, but we treat the same way it seems.

We saw a small but significant passing this week in my country indicative that another change was now to be properly relegated to the history books – our last World War One veteran passed away at the ripe old age of 110. There is no one left that can offer their perspectives and tales of what happened, it’s stories from dead people now.

We can celebrate their long life and the situations they’d have seen, but I’m not sure we can ever again appreciate what a universe-rocking event that person perceived and saw themselves participating in. My own grandfather was deployed during this ‘great war’ as it was then known, and it represented conflict on a scale never before seen. Virtually the entire planet was trying to annihilate one another. It had the potential of being an extinction level event was the common view at the time. It brought to everyday life horrors hitherto unseen – and now commonly available at the Cineplex sadly. It struck me on reading this news that big change happened less frequently, and was more dramatic then. It also made me think of those that served, and the role they’d have played in this change, and made me wonder what they would have thought of it – both then and in hindsight. Like many involved in any conflict, my own grandfather didn’t speak of what he saw, did or thought, so I’ll never know. I can say with some certainty that he would be uncomfortable with the excitement level about change that we enable today.

He saw the real thing, so the fuss made over a new gadget, celebrity comment or minor business development would be incomprehensible to him. He wouldn't fathom how these ‘rustlings’ represented change worth acknowledging – or perhaps he’d see it for what it is – the small noises that fill the calm between the storms.