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Urban sprawl up in these very large United States. This is the Los Angeles basin. Well, part of it. The whole metro area is really too big to effectively capture by photo since there’s an estimated 18.5 million people. The point is that it’s big. Photo by Aaron Hairston via Pexels.

Here is a post for the weekend with some perhaps helpful perspective.

Here’s the point:

This country is big.
The size and scale of the country is helping to buffer, counter, slow, and mitigate at least some of the enormous change that’s happening. It can also help us have the capacity to make big pivots in the midst of all this big change.

Saying that the country is big seems obvious.

Yet I think we forget that. And I think we forget how much of an asset that is.

This country is very huge, and very complex, and has a ton of people, and has a ton of diversity, and has a ton of land, and has a ton of resources, and has a ton of assets, and has a very, very huge economy.

We have a lot of brainpower. We also have a lot of fortitude, of persistence, of creativity, of resilience, and of caring — for each other, for our communities, and for the land.

There’s a fierceness, and it’s not new. It’s deep. It often gets overlooked. But it’s big, too. Look at what people did for other people in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area in the super coldness of this past winter. The fierceness is big.

Even with everything happening in the world and up in this country… the bigness of these United States is an asset. It’s going to help, with everything we’re dealing with. With world instability. With war. With threats and risks. With our own country’s government being very actively changed more than it has been for decades and decades. With climate change. With disasters. With oil, with reductions to oil, and with other changes to energy.

With all of that.

It matters for us that this country is big.

The size and scale of this country will help us have some buffers, some blocks, and some slowing to the huge changes that are moving through worldwide systems right now. And even to domestic systems.

There’s a lot of panic out there, and that’s fair. It’s justified. There are a lot of folks pushing fear, too, often for their own agendas. That’s less fair but it’s reality.

Yet maybe we don’t need to be totally terrified all the time. There’s some kind of a balance between being prudent and mitigating risk where possible… and in keeping some faith in the society we have all around us to hold together to a certain extent.

We have some very good reasons to be concerned about the state of things… and to be making huge, big changes in our own lives, organizations, businesses, schools, and so on because of the massive transformation and transitions happening up in our society. We should definitely be actively thinking through options and approaches to deal with all the change, and to work through possibilities and how to deal with them. Any of that work, thinking, and preparedness will help us when the actual changes, impacts, disasters, loss, or other tough things happen.

But it’s not going to all happen in an instant; in a heartbeat; in a flash. Mostly. There will be emergencies and some major impacts when things like disasters hit, or if there are cyber attacks or similar. But society-wide, we are unlikely to go through big, huge, devastating change in a flash. It definitely happens in the movies and the TV shows, but it isn’t necessarily to go happen that way here in this reality.

I do think all the change that’s unfolding through various systems is going to take some time to permeate out through many of those systems, and I think a lot of that is because we’re just so dang big.

Bigness has an inertia to it. It’s harder to move more and bigger things. It’s harder to destabilize them, just by the nature of how huge they are.

But our systems and people have something else going on within them — which is that a whole lot of people, businesses, colleges, nonprofits, cities, states, Tribes, schools, clubs, associations, neighbors, friends, families…
A lot of us don’t want the futures that are unfolding before us, or being pushed, or happening as cascading effects to other actions, and so on.
There are a whole heck of a lot of people and institutions that want to see different directions than where the official government is taking this country.
There’s something else, too, and it’s the drive to survive and thrive.
That’s personal. It’s what people want. People want to survive and thrive.
It’s also what businesses want. It’s what people who run cities want because they need the tax base to keep things going.

People, businesses, institutions, cities, and so on want this country to keep functioning because we all live in it and we want to keep it going and thriving so we can all keep living in it and so that other people can, too.

There’s a lot to be said for all that. It’s an incredible driver and creator of momentum and inertia.

I think a lot about Ukraine and how that country has survived and actually evolved in very brilliant ways since Russia attacked it in February, 2022. People, systems, institutions, infrastructure, and businesses have persisted. Ukraine has evolved — to be fair with a lot of outside support — but it has evolved to start transforming how war is conducted. But they’ve also kept their own society going. Even in the middle of a huge, long, devastating war that does keep impacting its people, its institutions, its businesses, and its infrastructure. It is not all sunshine and flowers and fancy new rugged tech. There has been incredible and devastating trauma. But they are also resolutely finding creative ways forward. They are problem-solving. They are imagining. They are working together. They are looking after each other.

We’re bigger, we have more assets, we have more land, we have more people, we have more technology, we have more internal alliances, and so on. We can survive the big changes coming our way, too, and find ways through. Just as one example and inspiration. It is flat-out stunning what Ukraine has accomplished. Yet look at our own history, too. We’ve done some super neat stuff. We have more to do.

Now to some quick stats. Population-wise, the US is the third largest country in the world at about 349 million people, behind India and China.

Third-largest. We forget that. It’s a heck of a lot of people. As Negan says in the TV series The Walking Dead, “People are a resource.”

People are a resource, and we have a lot of them. People are bigger than the government, and bigger than many of the other forces that drive what happens in this country. Power derives from a mandate from the masses, and all that. I suspect there’s much more to come in this current society transition that will involve the power of the people.

Geography-wise, the US is the fourth largest country in the world, behind Russia, Canada, and China. And our geography includes incredible resource assets including food-production capabilities and available water. Which is, of course, a lot of why this place was colonized.

US resources at work, albeit with much complexity. Irrigation sprinklers spraying water on a California agricultural field. Photo by Elibet Valencia Muñoz via Unsplash.

We have a lot of resources. It gives us resilience in ways other countries and places do not have.

To be fair, a lot of the systems we’re intertwined with and intermingled in are worldwide. We absolutely have huge vulnerabilities being part of very vulnerable and currently quite shaky world systems for things like the entire supply chain, and for particular specific things we need like computer chips and electrical grid pieces and parts. But we could do things now while we’re early in big change to start thinking through shortening supply chains, shifting how we grow food, what we manufacture, and so on.

We actually have a lot of options to make big change and big pivots, here, especially as we can see that the world and its systems are changing in so many ways. But that’s a topic for other posts.

My point today is that I don’t think huge, big, systemic collapse is going to happen to this country in a flash of a moment. I don’t think we’re going to be in a dystopian apocalypse in a few short weeks.

I do think things are going to get rougher, and especially for many different groups of vulnerable people and for people living in vulnerable places.

Yet I also think we’re going to have some time and some fast-rising motivation to start making big shifts up in this society. I think we can, too. We won’t be able to pivot everything, there will be a lot of damage, and there already is a lot of damage… but I think we have some time to make some big changes here in the midst of it all.

And we can lean into the bigness of it to help us find that fortitude and resilience, for now, while we think about options and look at the world around us. We can also breathe and eat and sleep and stuff, because if there’s anything we need in the midst of rising chaos, it’s to keep the basics handled so we can think clearly and make less panicked decisions when tricky stuff happens.

Okay be safe out there. Try not to get dead. Keep your wits about you. Have talks about this stuff with folks around you. Everything is changing, even despite all the bigness. It’s just that it’s probably not changing overnight. Or even in a few weeks.

Change is coming, so let’s get serious about dealing with it, in all the parts of our lives.

Forward and through. Let’s went.

-Vanessa Burnett

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