An Electric Revolution, Chapter Two: A Nation in Peril
As much as any decade in U.S. history, the one most recently concluded certainly tested national resiliency. In his book, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why The New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It, author Joshua Cooper Ramo describes how ideas and institutions that we once relied upon for our safety are failing. How is it that a global war on terror could produce more dangerous terrorists? How could a struggle to fend off a financial crisis accelerate its downward progress? Just a few years into the new century, he suggests, “we’ve arrived at a moment of peril that not long ago would have seemed unimaginable.”
Fear of how effectively the government would manage a pandemic flu virus is colored by how well it dealt with Hurricane Katrina. Ten years after the World Trade Center towers fell, an empty excavation site remains in their place. The busted real estate bubble and deflated stock market have dashed millions of Baby Boomer plans for a comfortable retirement. Indeed, today’s children are the first-ever U.S. generation whose economic and quality of life prospects are projected to be fewer than those of their parents. Most recently, the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster has threatened yet another major energy resource. And in the wake of the Great Recession, the entire nation wonders if another shoe is about to drop.
In The Age of the Unthinkable, Ramo looked at the physics of a sand pile as a metaphor for that shoe. When sand is piled grain by grain, it forms a perfect pyramid-shaped cone. Eventually, one or more grains will inevitably cause a side to slough off in an avalanche; the problem lies in predicting when. The cone of sand looked stable, but could give way at the drop of a single grain. One physicist calls the phenomenon “organized instability,” likening it to a fundamental force of nature that affects clouds and civilizations alike.
