When events outrun order

 Probably to no one's surprise, there have been terror attacks in Kabul. Well, maybe to the surprise of people who haven't paid attention to the last half century of events in the region. Although, it is interesting to see that there was at least one suicide bombing. You'd think that with the Taliban being firmly in control, having won the war, that tactics like that would be falling out of favor. Unless, you know, someone might've gotten a bomb dropped on their family and just really, really doesn't like the U.S. military.

Civilization is always a battle between chaos and order, and the effectiveness of a civilization in maintaining a balance on the side of order is a marker of how healthy it is. This isn't to say that order is always a great thing, as it can be expressed through tyranny just as easily as it can be through civic well-being. However, it takes a pretty rotten government to make chaos seem like a good alternative. Maybe a bad government is better than a good anarchy?

Everyone's known for a while that things aren't hitting on all cylinders in America. Covid and Afghanistan just really started to expose the cracks. Everyone's know for a while that people don't even want to talk to each other anymore. Donald Trump and George Floyd exposed those crack as well. It used to be that people disagreed on what the facts meant or what direction it should take them. Now, no one even agrees on the facts. People look for echo chambers that validate their own opinions, instead of picking up a book and learning something new.

In other words, there's a lot of sand in the gears lately, or at least we're just noticing it more. The contradictions in modern civilization have always been there - the assumption of unlimited growth and consumption building unlimited fortunes. Anyone can grow up to be Daddy Warbucks if they have enough gumption, except now you need gumption to work two or three jobs to make ends meet. Disorder, chaos, the dream life slipping farther and farther away. Get a better job, learn to code. Oh, what, there's not unlimited better jobs as coders?

As some point, the systems that buffer an orderly civilization just give out, usually because those systems have been built on dumb ideas and poor assumptions. What do you do when you reach the Pacific Ocean and there are no more Indians to beat up and no more unexploited resources to take? Or when everyone else has the Maxim Gun now? Or you wake up to find out that brown and yellow people also have nuclear weapons?

Right now, events are outrunning America and the American capacity to react and control them, maybe even the capacity to survive them. We can't control covid and we can't control Kabul. What comes next after that? The dollar collapsing? Mass immigration from the drying and dying western states? Political violence that breaks out because people can only live so long in a pressure cooker before they completely lose their minds? Whatever it is, it takes wise leadership and plentiful capacity to be able to absorb those blows. Right now, we have neither, and will probably never have it again. Here's hoping we getting a little pause before the next big event happens.