What if? Maybe you don’t want to know
I'm reading a book right now based on the idea of 'what if,' or what historians like to call 'counterfactual' forays into thinking about what might be had certain historical events never occurred. The last chapter I read dealt with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1862. What if, the book postulates, he had never issued it? Would slavery have lasted decades longer? Would European powers such as Britain and France have offered their support to the Confederate uprising, bringing about a totally different outcome to the Civil War? Might John Wilkes Booth not have had reason to shoot Lincoln? Might Mary Todd Lincoln never have said, 'Oh, Abe, all you do is talk about emancipation. How about taking out the trash for once?'And on the surmising goes.
As small, bored minds are wont to do, mine has wandered from the bigger questions of historical 'what ifs' to ones centered on my own trivial existence. For example, rather than pondering what might have been had the Mongols decided not to attack northern Syria in 1673, I wonder how the world might be different today had I not told my fifth-grade girlfriend that our German Shepherd had better breath than she did. I mean, might we have stayed together, gotten married, had kids, and started a successful multi-national marital advice counseling empire, helping millions of people around the globe achieve their romantic dreams? Could have happened. Too bad it smelled like Alpo when she yawned.
As much as counterfactual thought is as useless as a fact in a Hillary Clinton speech (Oh, don't worry, we'll get Donald in due time), it is mind-blowing to think how minor details have affected the course of human history. My book tells one story of the American Revolutionary War, when, with George Washington's upstart army mostly surrounded by superior British forces and in danger of annihilation, he escaped from what is now Brooklyn because of fog. Had the night been clear, history says, the British would have seen his men crossing the river in small boats, and wiped them out. But for fog, we might all be living under British rule, drinking tea and speaking like our undershorts are too tight.
I remember a morning about 20 years ago. I was on my way to work, about to make a left turn. I just happened to glance in my driver's side mirror, just in the nick of time to see a bread delivery truck whooshing past me at 60 mph. The dolt driver had passed me on the left, on a double yellow line, with my left turn signal light on, and had I not glanced over, the highway would have been covered with a thick mixture of my internal organs and day-old whole wheat slices. What if?
Had I died there that morning, of course there would have been the standard 3-day national mourning period, the president would have shut down the stock market until all danger of a global economic sell-off had passed, and the Pope, well, I don't know, at the least he would have cleared his schedule to preside at my funeral, I'm guessing. But otherwise, just how would things have changed? What if I was no more?
For starters, Pepsico Inc., the makers of Mountain Dew, might well be bankrupt by now, without my excessive consumption of their product over the last two decades. Seems minor, yeah, except for the hundreds of workers who would have lost their jobs. Tell them and their hungry kids that my untimely demise did not alter history.
And of course there would be have been major ramifications for the literary world, as authors across the globe would have scrambled for the rights to pen my biography. Had JK Rowling won, no Harry Potter. Hollywood would have been in a tizzy, with Liam Neeson likely to have gotten the starring role in my bipoic, and then, he might not have had time to film Taken, Taken 2 and Taken 3, which are all really the same movie, but you're too embarrassed to admit you paid to see it three times. Closer to home, with me out of the picture, you would not have been genuinely entertained by my words each week, and could have used the time for something valuable. Yeah, in other words, with me dead, you'd be better off. Go ahead, say it. Two ex-wives that I can think of off the top of my head had no problem with it.
Or how about that? What if I had never married nor had children? Might I have devoted my life to medicine, and maybe found the cure for cancer, or at least those little warty things that grow on your knuckles after you turn 50? Might I have gone into politics instead, maybe becoming a U.S. Senator who pushed the first real national healthcare bill through Congress, making all hospital visits free as long as you leave with fewer limbs than you came in with? Might it now be me running for President instead of Donald Trump, giving the American people a choice other than between an odor and a bad smell? What if, indeed? All of you know of certain times in your pasts when a seemingly insignificant turn of events changed the course of your days. What if you had forgotten your purse that one afternoon and not gone into that grocery store at just the exact moment you did, and not met your future husband (yeah, the one who you caught making out with your sister in the car at your wedding dance). Maybe you wouldn't be doing 35-to-life now. Or what if, the first time somebody offered you a cigarette, you had just said no, why, maybe then you'd still have lungs and be able to lift your hand to scratch your eyebrow without hacking up a handful of phlegm? Or what if -- just think about it now -- you'd never accidentally flipped the TV channel to The Biggest Loser, how much less frightened of a Twinkie you would be.
Yes, my friends, what if? Had Pontius Pilate decided to spare a young preacher from Bethlehem, how might the world be different? Had I never discovered Leave it to Beaver when I was 10, would I have been outside practicing baseball and become a major league star and be worth millions today as a celebrity adult diaper spokesman?
I guess we'll never know.
