We're all partners now

This is how Thomas Friedman, columnist of the NY Times finished his article 'The Great Iceland Meltdown'.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/opinion/19friedman.html?hp
One of the questions he addresses in this piece is why there are less police patrols in Surrey/England after icelandic banks were rescued by a government which is factually broke.
Globalization is such a complex phenomenon that investigating it reveals a lot of connections between seemingly unrelated things. What do you think links the war in Bosnia 13 years ago with the London bombings in 2005? Well according to Ed Husain's book 'The Islamist' the massacre where 8000 Bosnian muslims died made it easy for the militant, islamistic groups to recruit new 'soldiers'. They told the folks on the streets something like 'see people who were previously the neighbours of our muslim brothers killed them from one day to the next. This could happen in Britain too. Today the Whites are nice and tomorrow they slit your throat and rape your daughters'. Fear, as the last eight years of Bush regime have also taught us Westerners, is a powerful motivator.
This is one of many impacts of globalization. You can certainly think about others, for example by mentally tracing back where the t-shirt you're wearing came from.

This is intimidating because thinking about all these things shows us that anything seemingly trivial has consequences, most of which can't be anticipated because we simply don't have the mental capacity to consider the multitude of results which our behaviour might generate. What complicates the matter further is that we're not taught to think in systems. We study maths, geography, languages and history in separate units as if they had no relation to each other. But everything affects everything. This is frightening. But it means that you are important. What you do is important. Where you invest your money, how you vote, how you raise your children and what books you read are not trivial matters. They have consequences. Maybe someone got the confidence they needed from you today to carry out a difficult job. Maybe you're making an important difference and don't even know about it.