On that day, before noon, a man named Franz Urban made a wrong turn while driving the couple's car after an unsuccessful assassination attempt earlier in the day, passed in front of a shop where one of the conspirators had dejectedly gone to for lunch after hearing of the earlier failure.
It's said he tried to reverse and the car locked up briefly.
The conspirator, Gavrilo Princip, saw the targets there, and took his opportunity.
As a result of this:
- World War I
- Russian Revolution
- World War II
- Chinese Revolution
- Soviet Collectivization
- Korean War
- Chinese Cultural Revolution
- Viet Nam War
- and pretty much everything else going on since in the middle east that descends from the end of World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire
That's a death toll of what? Well over a quarter billion people at the very least.
All because Franz Urban made a wrong turn.
No, the raindrops never do think they are responsible for the flood, but we're not raindrops are we?
Should a person pay their entire life for a single mistake? We think not when it was our mistake and we look back on that moment we made a given decision and the set of events that followed on from there, and we ask G-d, why? Why do I have to pay for all my life? It's not fair. I don't have the knowledge of G-d. I can't know what my choices will do to my life in twenty years. I didn't mean all this. I didn't choose this. Why me?
So, think about that the next time you think yourself powerless. Any little thing you do, every moment you are alive, is a point of juncture between two divergent realities which themselves are divided by further junctures, some yours, some not, some which would have happened anyhow, and some which never would have without you.
You can change the whole world with one action however small.
You should also think about that the next time you are leaping to condemn people personally. No one should have to suffer forever. No one. You possess the power to short circuit chains of events such as those listed above by how you respond.
Sit still, calm yourself, and clear your mind.
You can see the future coming, can't you? You can see the world around you, feel like you're bobbing on a rapid, and for a moment, you can see upstream and downstream. You can see where things are going. You don't know all the specifics, or even many, but you feel the course. You can feel the way time is flowing. You can feel history playing out around you.
Keep that feeling. Hold on to it. See the world around you through it.
Maybe you'll see what I'm getting at, that something is coming for us. Something we're birthing. Something not right.
So I look, and I see the common themes being people believing ever more that they can't, instead of that they can, of believing the worst and not the best. I don't remember sensing this something not right before. Years ago, I sensed something better than that coming. Something has changed. A flood is coming.
And we are the raindrops.
The raindrops need to take five and clear their heads and ask, "is this really what we want?"
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