Whither the nation after an ominous week
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) listens to lawmakers call out their votes as he loses his third bid to become speaker of the House, at the Capitol in Washington, Friday. Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite
I’ve never been much of a prognosticator. None of us are, if we’re being honest. We remember we got it right, and wipe our memory banks clean of the times we got it wrong.
Sports fans are certain who is going to win the big game. Weather folks are sure the rains are coming, and when. Pollsters predict who is going to come out on top in the next election. Every day brings multiple reports of companies that did not meet analysts’ predictions for profit or growth, and while that puts the onus on companies for failing to live up to expectations, isn’t it at least as likely that the prognosticators got it wrong?
You can predict the future by looking at the past, it is said, but that hasn’t turned out so well lately as we careen through what sages call these unprecedented times because of all the things happening now that are, well, without precedent.
Over time, we come to take some predictions as more reliable than others, and some predictors as more learned than others, but in the end it’s pretty clear that when human beings or Mother Nature are involved, prediction is a risky business.
Eugene Ionesco got it right. “You can only predict things after they have happened,” he wrote, wise counsel from a playwright who was a major figure in the drama movement known as the Theatre of the Absurd.
Still, the fact that we so often get it wrong doesn’t diminish the understandable desire to know where we’re headed, and that is very much top of mind right now as we try to figure out what this past week’s disturbing tea leaves portend.
Israelis and Palestinians are lurching toward something, but what? A war confined to Gaza or a wider conflagration involving other Mideast players? Will there be another flashpoint like the hospital strike and will the powerful forces of social media, whether promoting inflammatory misinformation on who was responsible or not, spark a response that cannot be stopped once it has started? What to make of missiles from Yemen seemingly headed toward Israel before U.S. forces shot them down? What to make of drones in Syria and Iraq that shot at U.S. troops? What to make of the grinding war in Ukraine and the timing of Vladimir Putin meeting with Xi Jinping?
The State Department has issued a worldwide caution for American travelers citing “increased tensions in various locations . . . ” Worldwide. Think about that for a moment.
The queasiness is not only about events abroad.
Our political system also is lurching, but toward what? As Republicans flailed at naming a new House speaker, a possible government shutdown crept closer, yet large swaths of the GOP reacted to the prospect of working with Democrats on a solution as if they had been asked to form an alliance with Kim Jong Un. Amid the doomed rounds of voting came reports of death threats issued to Republicans, including some in the Long Island delegation, who wouldn’t back speaker-wannabee Jim Jordan, a scary spike in the GOP’s internecine conflict.
In the meantime, two lawyers who worked for Donald Trump pleaded guilty in the Georgia 2020 election interference case, which might not portend well for the former president. Trust continues to wither on all sides — in the media, in institutions, in social platforms, in our leaders. Another toxic presidential election looms whose unique feature is that large swaths of voters in both parties want someone other than their ordained candidate.
And at the intersection of international and domestic unease, a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy was stabbed to death in Illinois apparently for being Muslim as protests about Israel and Gaza continue on both sides.
We might not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but it would help to know when it’s blowing ill.
n COLUMNIST MICHAEL DOBIE’S opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
