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The Butterfly Effect: Reflections on Chance and the "It Might Have Beens" of History

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The United States had plenty of problems going into this new century, and even without the Bush presidency America would face --or avoid-- great challenges. Gore would, I expect, have been a respectable president, but far from flawless. And the forces that have taken over this country --forces that already had shown their dark and dangerous and destructive and dishonest nature through such other figures as Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, and through the ruthless campaign to undo the 1992 presidential election by any means possible-- would still be actively pursuing their nefarious agenda, even without their man in the White House.

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?

Even if we escape catastrophes beyond what is already evident, there is something disturbing about the idea that such momentous historical consequences could possibly ensue from something so minor and so fortuitous as an inadvertant blunder by a minor political bureaucrat in a single American county.

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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Andy Schmookler, an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia's 6th District. His new book -- written to have an impact on the central political battle of our time -- is (more...)
 
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