Update for August 4th

It's been a busy week, so sorry I haven't been around much. Obviously the crappy job has kept me busy, but this week I also had to get the updates posted on the Sam's Dot site, and I fell behind and had to do a rush job over the last couple of days of July. For those of you that have submitted to zines I edit, I hope to get through the slush piles in the next couple of days.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday morning about luck. Her boyfriend is currently serving in Baghdad in our "liberation" of the Iraqi people. Almost a week ago, she'd been talking to him when he suddenly told her he had to get off the phone...and of course, no, he couldn't tell her why. He was finally able to call her yesterday to let her know that several guys in his company had been killed by an IED. So she was understandably upset about this, but being the good girlfriend that she is, she wouldn't let him know. He has enough to worry about without having to worry about her...so of course, as one of her best friends, I was left to try to help hold her together.

We ended up talking about the roll luck plays in our lives. I'm a huge believer that things don't happen for a reason, rather, they just happen. It was just his luck that he wasn't the one out there when the IED went off. I couldn't have asked for a better illustration of my view then what happened last night. Several of us went out to eat, and then we went to the local Barnes & Noble. As she and I were headed back towards my place, we found the road being blocked off by the police because of what was obviously a serious accident. There were several police cars, an ambulance, and several firetrucks. Obviously something big had happened.

I found out this morning that an SUV had been broadsided by a drunk driver. As the SUV rolled, a ten year old boy was thrown to his death. Ten minutes earlier, and we would have been right there as it happened. Was it fate that we avoided the accident? No, just stupid luck.

As we took the long way home, we got to talking about the idea of predicting people's behavior, and I of course brought up Asimov's psychohistory, which I really think is a possible science of the future. Of course, I think it will be able to predict the futures of humanity, but not necessarily of a single human...because the plain and simple truth is that the individual doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Had Hitler been killed, would the Nazi movement have fizzled? I don't think so. Instead, we would be reading about similar events in history, but maybe it would be Himmler, or one of the other Nazis we'd be reading about. German society was ripe for the picking of the Nazi movement, and I think things would have been the same with or without Hitler. Sure, the actual events of World War II wouldn't be exactly the same, but they would be very similar.

By the same token, I think that had Dubya not been running for president, we still probably would have ended up with a neocon in office, with the same agenda that Bush has. Maybe it would have been Cheney, or maybe it would have been someone else, but we would still find ourselves in the same screwed up situation we're in right now. Again the names and events might be slightly different, but the situation would be very much the same.

I've rambled enough...