When the walls come crumbling down. Back in the thick of Trump and early Covid, in those summer months that became those autumn months that became those winter months of isolation and toxic orange sky dystopia and “mostly peaceful” protests, had someone told you that the world was maybe broken you probably would have said “no shit.” 2020 was insane, but “2020 is insane” was also a meme, and that sync between the very broad strokes of our objective reality and the story we all told about our world was at least, if almost nothing else, grounding. But this weekend, nearly a year after the vaccination, with a changing of the American political guard, and trillions of imaginary dollars come to right the world, I found myself staring at rows of empty shelves at Target wondering how this wasn’t the biggest story in the country. Inflation is approaching 5.5%. A crisis-level labor shortage, which the One Party has deemed resultant of a utopian-esque re-imagining of our relationship to work rather than what happens when you pay a workforce to stay home, has dovetailed with a supply-chain crisis. The cost of food, rent, automobiles, gas, and basic household goods — if you can find them — has skyrocketed. Violent crime has spiked. Authoritarianism has been normalized. But somehow, most of us seem to have internalized a sense that things are basically better than they were a year ago, with a belief our world will steadily improve while no coherent plan of improvement seems to exist. If left to course, this is a state of mind that all but guarantees further decay. Thankfully, a little over a week ago Ryan Petersen, the CEO of freight forwarding company Flexport, charted a different course.

On October 13th, the Los Angeles Times released photos of shipping gridlock at the Port of Los Angeles, a pervasive problem throughout the ports of Southern California. A few days later, in a long piece on the emotional well-being of freight workers, the Times again illustrated the gridlock. Over the last month, coverage of the port crisis has often looked like this: the mention of a problem occurring, the suggestion we get used to such problems occurring, and a weak reach, from right and leftwing media outlets alike, for yet another culture war tie-in nobody asked for and nobody needs. In one remarkable piece from the Atlantic’s Amanda Mull, it was even suggested there was no supply-chain crisis at all. The real crisis was consumerism, she argued — a crisis in our hearts, if you will — and this shameful desire of ours to buy and sell goods.

Then Ryan chartered a boat.