Get Ready For More Unthinkable Things

We felt invulnerable, but we were wrong

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

All my life, I’d hear about things the generations before me had lived through — world wars, the Great Depression, ravaging childhood diseases — and I’d think how lucky all of us living in contemporary Western culture are. 

I had no significant worries about infectious disease. Or war, which was something that didn’t affect many people unless they lived in areas much more dangerous than the United States. Only the Americans who quite literally signed up for it had to fight — the rest of us have been mostly unaffected. Or water, food or energy shortages. 

Covid was an eye-opener for many of us. Turns out infectious diseases can still kill us — who knew? And if we had any lingering beliefs that we were going to skate through without living in what the old curse calls “interesting times,” the very real possibility of World War III has thrown cold water on them.

Existential dread was already a thing, and now it’s ramped up considerably. Those of us with wide-open eyes were already concerned about climate change. Now we’ve added pandemics and war to our list.

We were like that spoiled rich kid who assumed Daddy’s money would always protect us from consequences, but it turns out Daddy made some bad investments. Now? Unthinkable things are happening. If you’d asked any of us six months ago whether we expected to see a land war in Europe, we’d have laughed. 

We aren’t laughing now.

And I can very easily imagine telling rapt great-grandchildren (should I live that long) all about what life was like in the Good Old Days, before everything went to hell.

Covid deniers exist for a reason.

I get it. It is much easier to deny something than to change one’s world view, especially if the problem is something you can’t fix. Why do you think so many women in the past (hell, even in the present) turned a blind eye to their husband’s philandering? If a woman depended on a man to support her and her children, what was she going to do? She probably couldn’t make her man behave. Nor could she necessarily just go out and find a job that would pay enough to support herself, let alone her children. That wasn’t so easy until relatively recently. It wasn’t unreasonable for her simply to decide not to know what she knew. 

This is exactly what a lot of Covid deniers did. 

You see the same thing with all the other really big problems facing the world. If there’s a problem you can’t solve, but you also have trouble facing it, just pretend it’s not real. If you can’t quite deny it exists, pretend that even though some people might be affected, you will not be one of them.

Here’s what that looks like:

War in Ukraine will not happen. OK, it’s happening, but it’s just a foreign problem. OK, it might affect the whole world in some ways, but it’s not going to affect me, because I’m an American. OK, it might hit my pocketbook but it won’t affect my safety. OK, there might be NATO troops involved eventually, but it should be mostly Europeans fighting. (Spoiler alert: It won’t be.)

We do this for climate change, too: 

Climate change isn’t real. OK, it might be real, but it’s not caused by humans so I don’t have to make any changes. Well, maybe we should make a few easy changes. Look, now you’re wanting me to make some pretty big changes, and I don’t want to, because I like my lifestyle that would absolutely wreck the earth if every human being tried to live like I do. They need to just … I don’t know … be content with how things are so I don’t have to change.

I don’t mean just to pick on Americans. Take a look at Germany. For years, it refused to increase its military spending. Now, all of a sudden, Germany is changing its tune, and upping its defense spending dramatically.

The unthinkable just became very thinkable indeed for Germany and the rest of Europe.

I’m married to a Dutch man who has friends and relatives in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and France. Each time we visit those countries, I have a fit of jealousy about how much better people there live. They have high-quality and affordable health care. They get several weeks of vacation a year — to start! They have many other benefits Americans can only dream of. 

(Current real-life example: Over the summer, my husband broke his leg in a workplace injury. Workers comp paid him about 66 percent of his wage while he was unable to work. At about the same time, his sister, who lives in Belgium, broke her arm. It wasn’t even a workplace injury; it happened at home. She received her full pay for part of her time off, and then a generous percentage of her pay for even longer. Through the years of our marriage, I have been shocked again and again and again by how much more generous European benefits are.) 

To my non-expert understanding, at least a good part of the reason Europeans can afford to live so much better is that they aren’t spending such huge proportions of their Gross Domestic Product on military spending. Think of it this way: If you aren’t buying guns with every paycheck, you can afford more medicine and time off. That’s the trade-off. 

One of the reasons my husband’s English was so good was that while he was living in the Netherlands, he coached a women’s softball team. He loves baseball, and had played on a German team until someone slid into his knee and tore up his leg. (He broke the other one this time, poor guy!) This team was largely made up of the wives and daughters of NATO soldiers, plus a few female NATO soldiers, serving at a base close to where he lived at the time. He explained to me that when he said NATO soldiers, he essentially meant Americans. Coaching these women increased his fluency in English. 

So now we’re married. Maybe we wouldn’t be if his English hadn’t allowed us to communicate so well. Thanks, NATO softball team!

It’s always seemed strange to me that the United States has soldiers serving all over the globe. Can you imagine if there were a German base down the street from you? It’s unthinkable. But we are everywhere. That link above is interactive, you can see what kind of bases we have in each part of the world. It’s amazing, and explains why we spend so much (possibly as much as $770 BILLION WITH A B this year and that amount will surely go up if we in any way enter the war, or even think we might). Yet, our big spending can’t protect us from terrorists unafraid to die in order to hurt us (as we learned on 9-11) and it didn’t deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. I don’t know if Putin honestly didn’t think we’d object to him helping himself to another big serving of Europe (we didn’t do much when he annexed Crimea) or what.

What other unthinkable things may become extremely thinkable soon?

• The election of more buffoons. I never saw Trump coming. He might or might not run again, but the GOP hasn’t done much to deal with its insane wing. If you watched the State of the Union, you saw the latest antics of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. No country can function with idiots in charge.

• Empty store shelves. (We learned nothing from Covid, apparently, because we’re surprised all over again now.)

• Energy rationing and shortages. We already have higher costs in the U.S. and may have actual rationing in Europe. (I was a young child when the long gas lines formed in the ’70s, but I remember them. Read the story in that link. It explains how American politics shifted right in response to our utter shock that we wouldn’t be able to have all the gas we wanted. There are lessons there, all of which we seem to have forgotten.)

• Higher military budgets, meaning higher taxes, here and in Europe. 

• More infectious disease deaths, due to either a new Covid variant or a whole new pathogen. We have millions of people who absolutely refuse to make the smallest effort to protect themselves or others from disease, and that’s something I honestly did not expect.

• An even greater risk of fake news. We know Russians aren’t being told what’s actually happening because Putin controls the press there. Plenty of gullible Americans are refusing to believe the truth even with our free press, because they prefer to believe Putin’s bots and trolls instead. Such is the power we’ve willingly given him. Nobody can make good decisions without good information, or with disinformation.

• What’s China’s response going to be? We depend on them for stuff (both crap and important things) as much as we have depended on Russia for energy.

Generally, most of us go about our days not thinking that much about the wide world. We have jobs to do. Kids to take care of. Meals to prepare, laundry to do, bathrooms to clean. The car needs an oil change and all the paperwork for taxes needs to be sorted. Do we really have to take the time to pay attention to the entire geopolitical situation, too?

Yes. You do. Because most of the unthinkable things are not actually that unthinkable if one is paying attention.