Spin Cycle

And now, the good news: It's not 2020. According to Peter Turchin, an ecologist, evolutionary biologist and mathematician at the University of Connecticut, that's when the United States will experience violent upheaval. "My model suggests that the next [peak in violence] will be worse than the one in 1970 because demographic variables such as wages, standards of living and a number of measures of intra-elite confrontation are all much worse this time." Remember, this is science, and people like Mister Turchin can't just make stuff like this up. It's a field of study called "cliodynamics," in which scientists attempt to find meaningful patterns in history.
If you recall, in 1970 there were all kinds of upheavals of society. The first Earth Day was celebrated, and it's probably no coincidence that this was also the year that the Environmental Protection Agency was created. But this probably isn't the heaving up that Turchin would like us to look at. Maybe it was the hundred thousand people who went to Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam, or the shootings at Kent State. Or when Jeffery MacDonald killed his family and blamed drug-crazed hippies. Or maybe it was most visible in Chevrolet's unveiling of their new model, the Vega.
I'm not sure if Mister Turchin gets out much, but I'm guessing that even in Connecticut they must be getting the scent of trouble brewing, even if we still have eight years to go by his clock. Maybe not Civil War type trouble, but people in the U.S. are up and heaving even as we speak. Tea Party? Occupy? I suppose the happy part of all of this is that if his predictions come true, we can look back on these as "The Good Old Days."
Yeesh.