We will never know just how that alternative scenario of American history might have played out.
But had we taken that other path, I would bet the farm on this: we'd live in a world far less precarious than what we see today in the global scene; we'd live in a nation whose basic political institutions and political culture would be far more intact and healthy than what we see in America now; and most of us would be very far from imagining that something so dark and dire as what we've seen happen here was a real possibility here in the United States.
Who knows how much damage from this Bushite presidency is yet to manifest. Will our democracy even survive this assault on our constitutional system and the rule of law? Will the dynamic of mounting strife between Islam and the West continue to gather momentum, reverberating for years or generations to come? Will the American irresponsibility on the environment bring the global system to some kind of tipping point that might otherwise have been evaded?
One has the feeling that huge effects should depend entirely on correspondingly huge causes. The unacceptability --intellectually and emotionally-- of the idea that something small could determine something huge was, I believe, one of the factors that fed the disbelief that a weirdo loner like Lee Harvey Oswald could possibly be sufficient to explain so massive a trauma as the assassination of a charismatic president in 1963.
But here we are. Bush and his gang came to power because a whole bunch of things conspired together, the elimination of any one of which would have sufficed to prevent this ongoing national nightmare. If Clinton had kept it in his pants. If Gore had run a better campaign. If Nader had stayed out. If the media had been fair. If the Bushites had not purged legitimate voters from the rolls on the phony basis of their being ex-cons.
And if the design of a particular ballot had not given us a particularly tragic illustration of "the butterfly effect."
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