THE BIG CRASH

Imagine you are driving along the highway, perhaps a bit above the speed limit. It doesn’t seem too big a deal since everyone is also driving the same speed. Suddenly the car to your right veers in front of you.  

You jam on the brake, too late, as you plow into the offending car.

Both cars starts spinning out into the oncoming rush. The car behind you, brakes screeching plows into your side, and just as suddenly, the car behind him adds to the growing pile up.
This is a carambolage. It is a wonderful French word for this kind of a crash; that expresses the idea of a disaster with multiple integrated causes. It is a concept which might be right at home with quantum physics. It is a word I have been using fro a few years to describe the interrelated carnage that we can all see happening around us as multiple crises overlap and accelerate each other. Its just that we don’t have a way of talking about overlapping disasters that allows us to see them with any clarity.

Instead of a careening car crash, most people are experiencing a huge historic “carambolage” of events as a cascade of ”unforeseen” events overwhelm our individual and collective sense of safety and stability. Maybe your personal scenario starts when you loose your job in financial services because of a credit freeze-up started by collapsing housing values. Sitting there fuming in a traffic jam you wonder how you will continue to pay for your gas and heating fuel. The rising prices are made worse by supply disruption connected to Global warming caused hurricane damage on the Gulf coast and possible peak in available oil supplies. As you arrive home, you are greeted by the sight of your son blankly staring at the TV eating a snack plate. This is the same son who has been staring at the TV for 23 years and even though he recently graduated from college he, along with 50% of recent graduates he can’t afford to live anywhere but at home. Your spouse starts screaming that your health insurance is no longer covers basic tests and she has found a lump on her breast. You feel like life is battering you from all angles, and you can’t get a handle on what is really happening.

Kurt Vonnegut has a maxim in his famous book, Cat’s Cradle. “Coincidence is when you weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was happening”. That pretty much explains how most people view the world. We each try to muster the energy to plod along within the demands of our jobs, and our families and perhaps the institutions that encompass those jobs and families. Everything outside that limited universe like politics, economics, environments, population, religion and technology all smack of something coincidental to our lives but not directly important. They are the things that dull wonky people talk about in newspapers or on NPR, but are rarely issues of everyday life. That is, of course, unless they come up and whack us upside the head, which is what is happening right now.

Welcome to the new world where you have to look in every direction to see what is coming next.  Its not just economics.  Its not just the climate.  Its not just energy.  Its not just any one thing, but how they all crash into each other while we aren't looking.

Well folks, its time to start looking, and wondering, and thinking about what you want to come next.  Lets have a conversation about it.