Early on September 8th in a tiny substation in Gila, Arizona (near Yuma), workers noticed a problem with a piece of equipment – a capacitor (about the size of a small car) – that manages changes in the local power grid load factor. Basically, this is one of two lines that carry power to the Imperial Valley, San Diego and Mexico’s Baja peninsula. The normal response is to reroute the power flowing through the station elsewhere, shut down the station, fix the problem, then reroute the power back through the now functioning station. At 3:27 PM on the 8th, the station went off-line, and relays pushed the power in alternative directions. Everything seemed fine. Nobody noticed the difference. The rerouting seemed successful, for about 11 minutes. Then, folks sequentially began losing power until seconds later 6 million people lost all power and connectivity to the outside world on one of the hottest days of summer with sweltering 100+ degree heat.
It took 12 hours for power to be restored, and while this failure did not rise to the level of the 2003 blackout in the Northeast, it did serve as a reminder of precisely how vulnerable we are and how an over-expanded power grid, old and getting older, no longer provides the level of infrastructural reliability we have all come to rely on. “Human error” as the apparent cause, but the system simply failed to provide the back-up systems that were designed for just such an occurrence. Airports, schools, government and private office buildings closed. Traffic signals stopped signaling. As pumping stations shut down, 1.9 million gallons of raw sewage spilled into the ocean off San Diego, forcing a beach closure for several days. Grocery stores had to throw away tons of spoiled meats and other once frozen products. When you think cyber attacks, think about what would happen if this outage could be imposed by terrorists all across the land.
Natural disasters – from tornadoes to hurricanes to earthquakes – test our infrastructure repeatedly. Wear and tear is natural. Infrastructure isn’t forever. Dams silt up, buildings losing their strength as structural components wear and fail, steel rusts, copper corrodes, bricks crumble, asphalt and concrete crack and break apart, stone is worn by the wind and rain. Entire civilizations crumble over time, from disrepair or intense man made or natural disasters. Anyone who has visited Rome or Istanbul knows of the ruins above and below the cities of powerful nations that are no more. Indeed, inattention, special interests prioritizing their needs over the needs of the overall society and the arrogance of success with the accompanying assumption that life will simply continue as it has for decades have been among the most destructive forces to challenge incumbent superpowers since time began. When you reach the top of the hill, everyone around you suddenly aspires to take that away from you.
It is human nature, when such extrinsic challenges to incumbent power occur, for incumbents to circle the wagons, grab on to everything and hold on, exclude the outside world and keep what they already have. However, the more they cling to the past and deny the future, the tighter their hold on what they have amplifies, the greater the risk of not modernizing, not embracing the change necessary to compete with those coveting your place on the hill, and not preparing for the future in general. The “one true thing” about change is that clinging to the past and holding on too tight to what you think you have is a recipe for complete failure and inevitable collapse. And yet, as we Americans grapple with how to deal with our massive deficit, that appears to be exactly the path our leaders have chosen for us. We have elected to stop investing in our future and try and salvage/retain what we think we have.
I’d like to repeat the words of journalist and author, Fareed Zakaria (born in India, emigrated to the U.S. who holds a Yale BA and a Harvard PhD in political science), from his best-selling book, The Post-American World (Release 2.0) (pages 60-61): “For sixty years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. We have urged peoples in distant lands to take up the challenge of competing in the global economy, freeing up their currencies and developing new industries. We counseled them to unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism. But now we are becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated – free markets, trade, immigration, and technological change. And all this is happening when the tide is going our way. Just as the world is opening up, America is closing down.
“Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its great and historic mission – it globalized the world. But along the way, they might write, it forgot to globalize itself.”
Today, we run from competition – for example making Americans pay double or more the cost of prescription drugs by banning cheaper imports under the completely unsupported regulatory assumption that only we can exert sufficient quality control (yet the great American pharmas have among the highest paid senior managements and spend the largest amount on marketing compared to other American companies) –slamming the door shut on immigration (even making it difficult for PhDs in highly technical fields to enter the US with their families), imposing absurd tariffs on imports like Brazilian ethanol, making raising capital too difficult for all but the richest sectors of the economy, allowing rich companies and unions to have a disproportionate voice in elections by uncapping their political action committee contributions, slashing our educational, research and infrastructural budgets as our competitor nations increase theirs… to name just a few of our current self-destructive efforts.
Remember, there is no economic collapse in: Russia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, the Middle East, etc. They revel in our dismantling of the systems and investments that made us great and kept us great for decades. What do they know that we forgot?
I’m Peter Dekom, and short-sighted and battered political “leadership” is destroying our future.
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