Feb 2001
Bert Speelpenning
Ever watch a toddler in a cart make a quick 180 degree turn? He stands up, lifts the cart above knee level, turns in place, sits down again and off he goes in the new direction. Our adult approach to changing direction is rarely this simple, never this direct. You'd have a hard time picturing Captain Picard turning around the Starship Enterprise in this way, or Captain Stubing the Love Boat, or Greenspan the economy, or Gandhi the British Empire. After all, we are adults, knowing of mass and weight, momentum and inertia, acutely aware that any state of affairs worth changing direction will have lots of mass and plenty of inertia. We know it takes many men to push a railroad car. We know to make the Love Boat turn right we must start turning the steering wheel a quarter mile early.
These analogies and metaphors from mechanics are natural and useful, yet looking at the affairs of the world through these frames keeps us from seeing and appreciating the awesome speed at which change may occur. Remember Gorbachev introducing Glasnost and how astonishingly soon afterward the Soviet Union and the Warsaw pact imploded? Remember Milosevic ordering an election in Yugoslavia to bolster his power and how quickly his whole country turned on him?
What most examples of society-wide change have in common is that they seem more like the spread of a disease, the propagation of a crack, than the spread of a cure to a disease. What does it take to bring about a desirable change?
The greatest example of a well-executed society-wide change happened in Sweden in 1967, and most of us missed it entirely. In Sweden people used to drive on the left side of the road, but all neighboring countries drove on the right. They wanted to switch, or rather they wanted to have switched. Imagine all that is involved in such a change - exit ramps and traffic signs on the wrong side, the impossibility of doing it gradually. All had to change, and all at the same time. It was done on September 3, 1967, without a single traffic fatality. I wasn't there, and I can't tell you how it was done. But I have an image of it that I can't shake, and that I want to share with you. An image of a million Swedes driving along peaceably, and suddenly, in unison, lifting their cars above knee level, turning in place and going off in the opposite direction, now at the right side of the road.