Present Future: Nothing to See Here

Does it bear repeating?  We're in bad shape.

And I'm not even talking about today's news.

Let's do the inventory anyway.  Here's what we need to face contingencies, disasters, major challenges of the near and farther future: capacity, redundancy, resilience.

As I'm thinking again about World War II, it becomes even clearer that the side that was going to win was the side that had the greatest capacity: the largest industrial base, the easiest access to the greatest amount and quality of resources, and the skills and organizational ability to use those assets.

Both sides had organizational ability and skills, close enough to cancel each other out, with a few crucial exceptions (radar, breaking codes and that Germany never developed an atomic bomb.)  But though both sides had formidable industries and resources, the United States just had more.

All that was used in the most insane way imaginable, which was to build thousands of complex devices and send them out to be blown up, sunk or shot into the air or through the water.  All created to destroy people and things, including themselves. The side that could keep on building them would win.  It's why we won.

The next crisis, or the next war, won't be precisely like that.  But it will take all those elements and we are short in key areas, and losing capacity by the day. Our manufacturing base is a fraction of what it was, and skills in all manner of making things (with the possible exceptions of smartphones and cardboard boxes) are being lost.  We don't make things anymore.  China makes things.  They have capacity, and ours is dwindling.

Another crucial area of capacity is food production, and judging from where and how far the food from the grocery comes from, we're getting in trouble there as well.

Without capacity, we are vulnerable to any disruption in transportation, for any reason: technical, political, environmental.  It's one thing to get goods across a contiguous expanse of land.  It's quite another to get stuff halfway around the world across oceans, in the quantities and frequencies our population requires.

Capacity also means the resources, including human resources and skills in identifying problems and delivering solutions.  These are resources that often only government can muster and deploy on a large enough scale.  Once again, capacity is thin and getting thinner--as tragically proven by what should be a national scandal regarding the federal response to hurricane devastation in Puerto Rico.  Or (as now documented) in Texas.

Puerto Ricans responded the way people all over the world respond to situations that make living in their homes and communities impossible: the ones who can leave, have left.  Puerto Rico is emptying out.  But sooner or later, we run out of places to abandon, and to go.

Capacity includes leadership, and in every crucial area in which we depend on federal leadership, we're obviously in trouble.  Congress can allocate money, but how it is spent is crucial.

Which suggests another area of capacity: information.  Apart from government's information gathering and dissemination, the capacity of independent media reporting is crucial.  That capacity is also dwindling.  Apparently with the resources the news media can now deploy, Puerto Rico may as well be the moon.

The internal infrastructure of this country--needed to transport resources and products, for example--is falling apart, and all Washington is doing is trying to figure out who can make money from it.  That's the infrastructure we need to respond to disasters and emergencies, to keep the country from splintering and falling apart.  Especially since resources for life--food and clothing--aren't close by anymore, almost everywhere in America.  Once the remaining stores empty out, of course.  Or you run out of gas.

Redundancy means more than one system to perform functions necessary to survive.  So in your home you don't want to totally depend on electricity, or totally on gas, or totally on batteries you can't replace anyway.  We're losing redundancy in almost everything now: communications, transportation, food, and increasingly, information.  That's a biggie.  Right now the satellites go out, the Internet goes down, and it's just about game over, because the alternatives have been starved to death.  Government used to think about these things.  Nobody seems to care anymore.

Think also how about how we're becoming more and more dependent on access to stuff from long distance: clothing, food and other things it would be hard to live without.  It also seems so easy, click click, and the truck shows up.  What could go wrong?  It would take very little to go wrong in this system to prevent it from working.  And with physical stores driven out of business because of this dependence, we're very quickly out of stuff and out of luck.  The redundancy in the consumer supply system-- several kinds and sizes of physical stories plus mail order from afar--is much weaker and is quickly disappearing.  No Amazon, no Fedex for a few weeks, and we're screwed.

Resilience is a buzzword in certain quarters these days, but it basically means the ability to take hits and keep going.  In the big picture, resilience (beyond individual character) comes from nature, where it's being destroyed.  It comes from community, which is destroying itself, although at least some spirit of "you'd do the same for me" persists.  It comes from families and individuals, but they can't do it alone.

It comes from institutions that are themselves resilient.  It used to come from businesses, but there are fewer local businesses anymore, with local ownership and resources.  It even came from corporations, when they identified themselves with the community, or even with America.  They mostly don't anymore, except for PR purposes. Do they even exist anywhere, when their faceless ownership is in another state and the only people who will talk to you are in another country? Their only allegiance is to their own greed.  I'm talking about you, Suddenlink and AT&T.

 And it comes from government, from the public sector, which is currently being destroyed from within in Washington, as well as looted on a massive scale.  So when it comes time for the federal government to save us all, as it did in 2009, the cupboard is bare, and the morons in charge won't know what to do anyway.

So, with suicidal policies in Washington, homicidal attitudes in the country, and a population with their heads buried in their screen toys, we seemingly haven't noticed that we don't know how to make anything or do anything, and don't have the means to do it anyway.

So no, we're not in great shape.  But let's move along.  Nothing to see here.