How Everything (Could Have) Changed

Watching cultural commentator Jeff Greenfield discuss his new book, “Then Everything Changed”, this morning, I was reminded of how much might have changed over most of the past decade if Al Gore‘s victory in the popular vote in 2000 (he won the vote by a margin of more than the population of Milwaukee) had counted.

Thanks to the obsolete Electoral College, and a little politicking by the Supreme court, it didn’t. Under President Gore, would we have gone to war again in Iraq, in Afghanistan? Would global climate change have been substantially shoved under the political rug? Would the national debt have grown to such proportions? We’ll never know, yet we came so close to finding out.

Those who think the future is set in stone, beware. For more on how future history will ultimately be distorted by America‘s unwillingness to deal with the failed Electoral College system of electing our Presidents, and how we can still fix it, see my essay for the Chicago Literary Club, “One Collage Too Many” at: http://www.chilit.org/Papers%20by%20author/Ebeling%20%20-Collage.htm