Walker Percy
wrote Lost in the Cosmos to be the
"last self-help book you would ever need." In it he spoke of the
person, people, who launch into the stratosphere and remain in orbit until they
manage to make re-entry. I think maybe Donald Trump and a myriad of followers have taken that course. He could become the next President of the US.
I once
posited a time-travel scenario that could explain a few political realities
most rational thinking human beings have pondered for many years now. This is
how it goes.
Either time
travel is not possible or time travel is possible. No vagueness there. If time
travel is not possible then you can stop reading now. If it is possible, then
our future selves will use it. Indeed they may have been using it for a long
time. They would choose to use it wisely in order to not screw up their
timeline and make their world a worse place to be.
They would
have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, or so one might think. They would know
about when the world went terribly wrong and be able to deduce when the fubar
took place. They would also have multiple tries at getting it right, sort of
like Groundhog Day the movie. Well
anyway. They would go into their past and make little changes to the time line
to effectuate the outcome they want. Any changes they make would be only what
we had ever seen and knew so WE would be totally unawares.
Now consider
this. The final outcome of the 2000 Presidential election rested on one or two
goofy precincts in Florida and maybe one in Ohio. A few hundred ballots ruled either
valid or invalid turned the outcome from President Al Gore into President
George W. Bush. The complexion of the Supreme Court decided the final outcome.
Here's the
intrigue. Our future selves saw the outcome of President Gore, whatever that
might have been and decided that President Bush would do what needed to be
done, whatever that was. Who am I kidding, we saw what he and his
Administration did. But. But was that the lesser of evils? Only they would
know. But now that they made the change, they don't know either.
If time
travel is possible, and 8 years of Bush was the preferred outcome, I shudder to
think what President Gore might have wrought. The scenario doesn't stop there.
If the easy swap of a few ballots produced a worse outcome, one with which our
future selves could not live, they would have fixed it and we would never have
known. Therefore, the Bush Presidency was the better outcome.
Now I have
to think about this. Maybe, just maybe, we needed 8 years of George W. Bush in
order to get 8 years of Barack Obama. Certainly the Bush Administration
directly led to the attitudes of the electorate and their voting for the first African
American president in this nation's history. By my same logic about future people
knowing the outcomes of decisions of today, President Barack Obama is (was) the
preferred choice, not Mitt Romney.
Going one
step further, if Donald J. Trump becomes President, it will be the preferred
outcome of a world who knows the outcomes of each possible president.
Alternatively, time travel is not possible and that scares me the most. It is
either that or the world is so screwed up in the future that they think the
paths we are on now are the correct ones – whatever that path is. Finally, Maybe we need to have President Trump in order to create what is next after him. Again I shudder.
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