The Tipping Point

Protestor Mom Cindy Sheehan Arrested in D.C.

The Department of Homeland Security was able to back down the Official Terror Alert from an “orange” to a “yellow” this past Monday thanks to the quick action of the Washington, D.C. police who apprehended “protestor mom” Cindy Sheehan during a rally in a park across the street from the White House.

Sheehan, 48, whose son died while serving in Iraq last year, had evidently terrorized President Bush by camping outside his Crawford, Texas ranch during his five-week vacation this summer. Her requests to meet with our Commander-in-Chief were repeatedly rebuffed by the president who, apparently, had too much pressing business with his mountain bike and outdoor grill. As everyone assumed, she would have used that meeting to express her desire for peace in Iraq and a quick withdrawal of our military men and women from that war-torn country.

Our president considers such a request to be nothing more than crying over spilt milk.

But is it, really?

I am currently reading Malcolm Gladwell’s fascinating book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The book spent a number of weeks on The New York Times Bestseller List for non-fiction and it spells out how trends tend to work like viruses—they build slowly until they reach a certain point and then they spread like wildfire. The mechanics of fads, trends, rumors, even the spread of venereal diseases follow certain laws that can be explained very much like economic theories.

Gladwell uses several examples including an interesting one about the near demise and resurrection of the Hush Puppies shoe brand. Sales of Hush Puppies were so low recently that its parent company, Wolverine World Wide—a Michigan boot firm—considered dropping the line entirely. Then a strange thing happened. Some hipsters hanging around the boutiques and coffee houses in the fashion districts of New York decided it would be cool to wear the decidedly square Hush Puppies. Some fashion designers saw these kids wearing them and put them on their models’ feet as they trotted out the new fashion lines on the runway. From the runway, Hush Puppies became the hottest fashion accessory since the toy Chihuahua, and the trend spread from New York to the rest of the world in less than a year.

The tipping point was not some slacker kids wearing the shoes, states Gladwell, but influential people in the fashion industry imitating those kids.

Gladwell’s theories about trends can be extended to non-material subjects such as the national consensus. For example, drunk driving used to not be as big of a deal as it is today. Don’t believe me? In 1976, when George W. Bush was 30, he was arrested for driving while drunk near his parents’ home in Kennebunkport, Maine. His punishment? A $150 fine and the temporary suspension of his driving privileges. That’s a slap on the wrist you would need a stethoscope to hear.

Soon after that, in 1980 to be exact, a group calling itself Mothers Against Drunk Drivers came into being. It turns out many of these mothers had lost kids because our country’s lawmakers considered it no big deal to be inebriated while behind the wheel of a two-ton piece of steel traveling 65 miles per hour.

Within just a few years, this special interest group had the age limit for alcohol consumption in just about every state in the nation raised from 18 to 21. Some credit free market cheerleader Ronald Reagan for this achievement, but do you honestly think he would’ve put a roadblock in front of the beer industry without the nudge of MADD?

Now celebrating its silver anniversary, MADD is branching out to other causes under the name Mothers Against Distracted Drivers. As soon as the number of lives lost from careless people driving and using their cell phones reaches the tipping point, believe you me, that privilege will end. And MADD will have led the charge to change the laws.

Here’s the deal: Don’t ever underestimated the will and determination of a mother who has lost her child. Cindy Sheehan may seem like a liberal crank to a lot of people, but every day there are one or two or three mothers in America joining her as they stand at their children’s flag-draped gravesides.

One of these days, that number will reach the tipping point.