First I read, maybe a year ago, about hardship in Mexico over the doubling of the price of corn tortillas. It meant nothing to me. Then, months later, a couple lines about fistfights in a bread queue in Egypt. An isolated incident, I thought. One small factoid in a sea of news stories.

It was in fact the handwriting on the wall. It was the child’s marble that rolled off a table in the movie Titanic, chilling omen of what was coming.

When Afghan farmers plow under their poppy fields to grow grain because cereal is becoming more lucrative than heroin; when The Wall Street Journal suggests “it’s time for Americans to start stockpiling food” — and they’re not smiling; when CNN reports that “riots from Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt over the soaring costs of basic foods have brought the issue to a boiling point and catapulted it to the forefront of the world’s attention”; then this is the world’s big story.

Here is the coalescing of many news stories that were seen only piecemeal and separate till now — the rising cost of fuel, the teetering of financial institutions, the groaning of the planet’s ecosystems, corruption in government, the rage of disadvantaged nations against wealthy nations, the casting off of all private morality and headlong plunge into debauchery.

The prophet’s question echoes in my ears: “But what will you do when the end comes?” (Isaiah 5:31). Suddenly, most of the things I’ve been worrying about seem very shameful.