"How can - I - change the world? I'm only one person!"

This is a modification of a Facebook post I made on June 28th, 2014 about the start of the Great War...

"I'm just one person, how can I change the world?" You have the power to alter the course of history profoundly. Take for instance Gavrilo Princip (pronounced [ɡǎʋrilɔ prǐntsip) Have you ever heard of him?

Gavrile Princip. Photo coutesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Most people haven't. Standing outside a deli in Sarajevo 100 years ago on June 28th 1914 and two bullets later Gavrilo Princip created the geopolitical world as we understand it today. He shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, the result was an ultimatum from Austria-Hungary to the Serbia that would fail to be met. That set in motion a web of treaties and counter treaty measures that made up the turn of the century politics and was thought to prevent war, but instead forced war to come and would end up with the bulk of the "civilized" world going to a unprecedented level of war so bad it has yet to be duplicated. The reverberations of which continued for years, even to today, some of which include a second world war, the collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, the slow deterioration of the British colonial empire, the rise of nationalism in colonial powers including the Vietnam conflicts, middle east unrest and rise of Communism in Russia and all those implications as well are only a few consequences. Gavrilo Princip never saw this. He died of tuberculosis in jail months before the first war ended. Today would have been his 120th birthday had he lived that long.

What can one person do? They could make a decision that unleashes a wave a destruction that would wash the old world away and derail the lives of so many people that it is truly incalculable. I'm not advocating assassination or mayhem, only a reminder of what our power of choice can do, good or bad, for decisions great and small. We have that power, the same as Gavrilo.

  Be careful what you do with your powers.