Human beings are built to adapt and this has given us incredible resilience, but it also means we have a tendency to wait too long to fix the parts of our society that are broken. Instead, we let the problems build and fester until, sadly, the final straw falls and everything comes crashing down.

Sometimes this collapse is by chance and sometimes it's by design. In either case the catalyst is the same – The public does not prepare and they don't take action to correct the people creating the crisis until it's too late.

In our modern era of invasive technology, economic weakness, nuclear weapons and biowarfare, this is an unsustainable model. We can no longer ignore threats on instability in the hopes that they will go away or that governments will defuse the danger, nor can we simply pick up the pieces over and over again after each calamity. There may come a time when the mess is so big we won't be able to clean it up. People must plan ahead, and they must stop tolerating the notion of passive involvement in the mechanisms that influence their lives and future.

I write often about hypothetical trigger events and breakdown scenarios because a large number of people still need to be educated on how fragile the western world truly is right now. For example, any significant disruption to supply chains and logistics at this time would be devastating for a large number of Americans (or Europeans).

In the past couple weeks alone there has been a rising tide of political discontent among US truckers; the very people that handle over 70% of all freight in our country. They have threatened to boycott a number of Democrat controlled cities (primarily New York City) over a host of issues and complaints including the legal treatment of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.  This boycott may not play out in the near term (watch for talk of boycotts to escalate in November around election time), but the potential is on the table and it's an important learning moment.  What would happen if the US freight system actually stopped?