LOOKING BACK: THREE THINGS I NEVER THOUGHT WOULD HAPPEN. In 1980, there were certain things I took for granted. Three things have happened that I never thought would happen in my lifetime or even in my children’s lifetimes. I never thought the murder rate in New York City would decline, much less, decline sharply. I never thought that apartheid in South Africa would end. And I never thought that the Iron Curtain would come down and that Eastern Europe would become free.
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Is there any particular reason you thought these three things would never end? Was it because they had so much inertia to them? Because they had always been a reality?
Good questions, Nick. What I find interesting about these events that surprised Dad is how they’re all positive. Apparently he expected very bad things to continue in the same vein forever. Since, as we both know, Dad tries to be so hopeful about trying new things and say “it’s not so bad” about a lot of things, I think of him as a positive person. This expectation of his offers a view of his cynical or pessimistic side.
Sorry to analyze you on your own blog, Dad!
My undergraduate thesis advisor told me to work on South Africa because transformation could be only five years away (by 1965). I learned to be more pessimistic as the dark night of apartheid worsened through the 1970s and 80s. I was sure change would come, perhaps in my liftime, but I thought it would be horribly violent and leave a devastated society.
If you read George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram” published in Foreign Affairs in 1947 under the name “Mr. X,” you’d find an almost exact description of the gradual corrosive process that would transform the Soviet system.
But on all these things, the exact timing is very hard to predict. Look at how often the date for the “Second Coming” has been revised when deadlines were not met. Isn’t it amazing that the believers are still so optimistic that the “rapture” will be soon and that the prophecies are about to be fulfilled!
I’m glad that I don’t have to worry about that as I plan on simply being recycled!
Nick and Annalisa, I can’t really give reasons for my thinking then because I don’t think I ever considered the possibility of any of the three changes. I can say in my defense that I really saw nothing in print speculating about the possibility of any of the changes. Thinking about them now, I could speculate that systems like Communism and apartheid had never been overthrown and that I believed that brute force would always prevail. A number of different explanations have been advanced for the fall of the Communist Party. I have never been able to reject the theory that Gorbachev simply refused to send in the tanks. As for the crime rate in New York, it just kept going up. Note that Dick Weisfelder really knew about South Africa, and he thought that apartheid couldn’t last.