The Reincarnation of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

I confess that I don't follow the news much these days.  I have guilt feelings about this from time to time as I was raised on it being an important function for a citizen to be well informed.  But I find that nowadays when I do return to a news or opinion piece in the New York Times, it doesn't take long for me to get irritated and then become very angry.  I really don't need more stress in my life, so more often than not I will stop the reading before I have given my own critical analysis of what I was reading, something I would do as a matter of course when I was reading the Times regularly and watching the News Hour on TV.  I have to say that to the extent I remain informed at all it is mostly from gathering tidbits of what friends in Facebook post; some of them are for more engaged with the news than I am.

So, unlike my usual blogging in the past, what I say here is much more about intuition and feel, without much analysis going into it at all.  And with that let me note that because we were taught that history tends to repeat itself, there have been many comparisons between what is going on in the America now and what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, before the start of World War II.  For a while I thought those comparisons were spot on, but now I'm wondering whether some other comparison may be more apt to describe the present circumstance.

In Social Studies class, I can't remember whether it was Junior High or High School, we were taught that the event which precipitated the start of World War I was the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.  We were taught this in a somewhat disembodied way, without making connection to the full chain of events that ensued thereafter, as much of the history we learned was about dates and places in a somewhat isolated way, without the full story to connect them.  But when I was in High School I had a a very good memory.  The assassination of the Archduke is a factoid I can recall, even now.

To connect this to the present, there seem to be a large variety of situations globally that are creating great strain, where any one of them might serve as a tinderbox that produces a larger eruption.  Because I'm writing this by intuition rather than by analysis, I won't try to predict when and where the triggering event will occur.  But surely, it feels like it will be soon, and there is an absence of calming correctives that might prevent us from going over the deep end.

So, even ignorant of the news as I am, I worry quite a bit about what will happen.  I suppose the worrying is inevitable.  I very much hope that it is needless and that we will muddle through these troubling times, with this foreboding of a cataclysmic event merely a bad dream and nothing more.