The Unthinkable is unthinkable until it happens. The Unthinkable is unthinkable until it’s not.

 

Can we really say that circa 400 A.D., the Romans (those who were left) could imagine that their world would actually end?  No, but it ended all the same.

 

Let’s go further back in time.  If dinosaurs thought, did they imagine that the earth would be struck by a meteor and their world would end?  No, but their world ended regardless.

 

What about the Younger Dryas?  Thousands of years of gradual global warming brought to an end – catastrophe, floods, then a 1200-year ice age before more floods and the warm up in which we live now? Just as human as we are, did those people think their world would end? We live in the same warming period. When will our age end? Isn’t Yellowstone overdue to blow?

 

Sumeria. The first cities (that we know of). A thousand years of Ur’s. All gone. Broken idols. Fallen ziggurats. Desert.

 

Bronze Age Collapse, anyone? 1150 B.C. or thereabouts, could the people of that glittering age of human achievement imagine their world would end, sending most of them back to the dark ages with only Egypt left barely holding on? No, but the Bronze Age did end, so much so that we are still uncovering its history through archaeology, epic, and myth.

 

Could the Persians honestly believe that a chronically disjointed, warring rabble of Greeks could defeat an empire? No, but the Persians were defeated nonetheless.

 

Medieval Europe, circa 1300 A.D. Castles, monasteries, cathedrals. Flying buttresses all around. How could it end? Then, a little ice age, plague and, eventually, an end to a world where institutions had all the answers.  

 

Let’s talk about events closer in time. Summer 1914, Europe in all its glory, ruler of the world, for better or worse. British Empire, Hapsburg Empire, Russian Empire, German Empire. By the end of that decade, three empires wiped away with only Britain barely holding on.

 

Late 1914. Did the soldiers in their newly dug trenches and their families back home really believe that such a war could continue for four more years, millions dead, a generation of men lost? No, but it happened all the same. It was always horror, but at first it was fantasy. Now, it’s history.

 

1945. World War, Part II ends with a bang, a big bang. Two of them, as a matter of fact. Could the people who ushered in an Atomic Age have seen a decade before what they would unleash? Probably not. Then again, a decade before, many of them would have called an existential conflict between world powers impossible. Only a bigger existential threat would end the first existential threat.

 

Now, here we are. Russians in Ukraine. China on the move. A wavering, lost America whose military-industrial complex is hard at work making mon-, uh, helping the Ukrainians fight off the Russians.

 

Oh, Putin would never use a nuclear weapon. No way. He’d never do that. That would be – madness.

 

Our glittering world – technology, globalism, distraction 24/7. Beautiful world. So was the Bronze Age. So was Rome. So was Persia. So was Europe. Their worlds ended. Ours can, too. Boom.

 

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

 

Unwinding world. Can we watch it on tv? Can we stream it? Why doesn’t the tv work? Why don’t I have a signal?

 

What rough beast slouches toward D.C., New York, Moscow, Beijing to be born?

 

The Unthinkable is unthinkable until it happens. The Unthinkable is unthinkable until it’s not.