War

It’s impossible to process what has happened in March.

I can only liken it to the start of WWI. The day before Archduke Ferdinand was shot, the world was blissfully ignorant.

Economists were SURE there could never be a world war because our economies were too interconnected with each other.

Within two weeks of the assassination in Sarajevo, all of Europe was at war and the world would never be the same.

Peace one minute. War the next. Unfathomable death and destruction followed.

Millions died.

And two weeks before, when Gavrilo Princip pulled that trigger, the world was at peace.

It is as close as I can come to understanding the speed by which everything has changed for us.

This has felt, for the last month, like the world was shifting under me; like I have been unmoored by time; like the world no longer makes sense.

After the end of World War I, nothing was the same, and for almost everybody, things were worse.

This event will change the world in ways we cannot even fathom. New powers will rise. Old ones will set.

But we decide whether we come out of this better or worse.

Woodrow Wilson tried to establish a League of Nations and stressed leniency for Germany after they surrendered.

The rest of Europe, bitter and beleaguered, having watched their brothers and sisters die at the hands of Germany and its allies, chose to strangle them with sanctions dooming its citizens to squalor, and in doing so, inadvertently gave rise to Hilter and the Third Reich.

Who knows what would have happened if our forefathers had chosen compassion and understanding over bitter vengeance.

We have that choice again.

Every one of us.

This is an unprecedented time in our history. It might last months or even years.

But we write this story, as our ancestors wrote theirs. Their tale is one of greed and vengeance, of destroying nature in service to the almighty dollar.

That does not have to be our story.

We can write a story of hope; of kindness; of bravery.

That choice is ours.

Choose to fight for a better world after this is over. This may be the last gasp of the old world, and it is fighting to remain, strangling us in the process.

Nothing will be the same once this is over, for better or for worse.

What new world will we make from the old one’s ashes?

That is our choice. That is our hope.