As Americans we are very good at kicking the can down the road. Facing up to the facts early is just not in our DNA. When faced with hard realities, we prefer to defer action to some future date than to take the immediate poison pill that will help us in the future. Thus, we have the debt crisis, the climate crisis, the social entitlement crisis, the military staffing crisis — anything else? Oh, yes — lack of trust in institutions, especially government — crisis. All is well, nothing to be worried about!
What got me thinking and writing about the above is this blog post: “The Coming Crisis: A New Age Now Begins” by John Plodinec.
The blog post is not so much predictive as providing alternative scenarios for our collective futures. Why share this here and now?
As a history major I like looking back to try and look forward. My historical hypothesis is that history is cyclical and what we are seeing is that circle is speeding up. The rise and fall of empires used to take centuries and now I think it is decades. Unfortunately, I can’t prove it to you, I just feel it in my bones/brain.
Why write about here and now? Well, emergency management, the profession and everything that makes it up, being grants, research or pandemics, impacts us in a very real way. We are not working and living in isolation. We are part of the political process. Science and technology is impacting us more and more every day.
So, crawl out of your emergency management hole and look around to see what is happening all around you. You might not be able to change events, but you personally and your organization can do the best job possible to adapt to what is happening.
“Tumultuous” seems to be one word to describe where we are and where we are heading. Even if the one course of action described in the blog post above is successful and we “muddle through,” it will still not be pretty.
