Read this quote in an email a friend wrote and traced the source to a Dave Smalley. Fitting words for 2009: culture, education, economy, transportation, jobs – it all points to this:

The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.
— Dave E. Smalley