So here's the thing: I suppose a couple of us get 'bragging rights' to say 'I told you so' (like me...) that a disaster of this level was coming. It doesn't give any comfort to say that we were right, we'd much rather be wrong.... And others will reply that this is a 'black swan' event, completely unpredictable in the normal course of events, so no, you could never have predicted this.
This particular event, of course, was not in any sense predictable. But some unpredictable event was always likely to happen, literally half or much more of the Presidency is about keeping the country and the world afloat in a sea of unpredictable events. So when you have a head of state who can't manage unpredictable events like Trump or Kaiser Wilhelm or Czar Nicholas or Louis XVI or Emperor Commodus or Sultan Ibrahim or Sha Reza in Iran or James Buchanan, it becomes far more likely that one of these events will balloon into something so lethal and chaotic that it alters the course of history forever and the country in question only recovers after a cataclysmic loss of life.
Is that what's coming for us? Well, not necessarily, but we now experience a nearly 9/11 rate of casualty literally every day, and the economy has never contracted like this in world history, not even in 1929 when the Great Depression began. So whatever new era this is, this is the beginning, not the end, and while there's a lot of reason for hope as a group that we'll emerge on the other side stronger, perhaps much stronger, than we were before, but as individuals, these transitional periods are usually very very difficult, and nobody's survival is 100% guaranteed.
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