A New Year's Message from Grinder
Before I sat down to write my New Year's greeting for 2010 I went back into the archives and read through the previous posts that kicked off 2008 and 2009. It was both illuminating and humbling to read those posts that seem so long ago yet really weren't, and a little bit embarrassing, I must confess, to read some of the silly things that I wrote.
Okay, so not all of it was silly. In fact, I think my post in the beginning of 2009 made a lot more sense than my post in the beginning of 2008. 2009 was the first year I entered at least partially filled with hope.
So what about 2010? Now that we're through the "naughts" and into the "teens" I really feel like we've arrived in a distant and exotic future time, one that seemed unreal when I was a child.
Time magazine has put out a special edition on they 20th anniversary of 1989, the year of such monumental change that it has in many ways created the world we live in today. In case you missed it (as I very nearly did) 1989 marked the fall of communism in Europe, the Tiannamen Square massacre, the beginning of the end of apartheid in South Africa and the birth of a little thing called HTML and the World Wide Web.
Twenty years later it truly is a different world, a different reality, a different game. Twenty years later the boy who was too young to firmly grasp what he was seeing on his brand-new colour TV has become the man eager to grab hold of the limitless potential this astounding new world. In 1989 there were no bloggers. No locavores, texting, sexting or Blu-ray. No fast, easy, free communication, no seamless networks, no digital platforms from which anyone could, with more brains than money, build, create or become almost anything that could be interfaced through a screen, a keyboard and a mouse.
I started off 2009 with hope. I'll start off 2010 with optimism. Yes, vast challenges lay ahead, as they always do, and it would be foolish to wish them away. But there's so, so much reason to not just be hopeful, but to be optimistic, to believe that this is the year that will go down as the one where things really started to take flight.
Happy New Year!
Okay, so not all of it was silly. In fact, I think my post in the beginning of 2009 made a lot more sense than my post in the beginning of 2008. 2009 was the first year I entered at least partially filled with hope.
So what about 2010? Now that we're through the "naughts" and into the "teens" I really feel like we've arrived in a distant and exotic future time, one that seemed unreal when I was a child.
Time magazine has put out a special edition on they 20th anniversary of 1989, the year of such monumental change that it has in many ways created the world we live in today. In case you missed it (as I very nearly did) 1989 marked the fall of communism in Europe, the Tiannamen Square massacre, the beginning of the end of apartheid in South Africa and the birth of a little thing called HTML and the World Wide Web.
Twenty years later it truly is a different world, a different reality, a different game. Twenty years later the boy who was too young to firmly grasp what he was seeing on his brand-new colour TV has become the man eager to grab hold of the limitless potential this astounding new world. In 1989 there were no bloggers. No locavores, texting, sexting or Blu-ray. No fast, easy, free communication, no seamless networks, no digital platforms from which anyone could, with more brains than money, build, create or become almost anything that could be interfaced through a screen, a keyboard and a mouse.
I started off 2009 with hope. I'll start off 2010 with optimism. Yes, vast challenges lay ahead, as they always do, and it would be foolish to wish them away. But there's so, so much reason to not just be hopeful, but to be optimistic, to believe that this is the year that will go down as the one where things really started to take flight.
Happy New Year!
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