Loose thoughts on: “what if”

Hi, it’s been awhile! At the beginning of the Covid outbreak, I was laid off and after giving myself a week of feeling really low, I kicked up a little newsletter called The Media Nut. I wrote about the business of media. It was great. Trust me. But before TMN, I had this little blog here where I would dump thoughts. And, well, I’m in a bit of a retrospective mood these days, and I moved TMN from Substack to here, and figured I’d dump some more thoughts. I’m hoping to do this a bit more often, but, as Iron Mike says, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

If you received this because you were a subscriber to TMN, hello again! If you want to unsubscribe, I will not feel bad. Well, maybe a little, but I totally understand. If you subscribed to TMN after 2021, when I started my current gig, nice to meet you. I’m Josh. If you landed here because you saw this somewhere, howdy!

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Monday Night Football saved his life. Or so that’s what my buddy Rich told me years after that fateful September Tuesday.

Rich was running late for work at 1 WTC because he stayed up to watch the New York football Giants lose to the Denver Broncos on Monday night football. Which meant he overslept that Tuesday morning, which was quite gorgeous, all things considered, and arrived at work at 8:49.

Well, not really arrived at work but at the WTC subway stop. Which meant that he felt the immediate shockwave of the plane flying into the building instead of, you know, being vaporized by the plane flying into the building. Rich got to live over the next quarter century while 2,977 people, including my old friend and former roommate’s girlfriend Brooke, remained their age forever.

Life is a collection of little near misses, what ifs—What if I didn’t stay up to watch the game? What if I didn’t respond to her dating profile? What if I took that job instead? If we’re lucky, one of those misses turns into a hit. Then, the course of a life changes. We find our other. We find our passion. We find our path.

On a grander scale, we spend lots of creative energy on societal what-ifs: What if Oswald missed? What if Hinkley didn’t? The course of history can be measured in millimeters.

But a big What If, capital W, capital I: What If Sandra Day O’Connor swung in Gore’s favor? is the one that trips my brain up because this whole century (so far!) is a very different one if Sandy let Florida’s recount continue and it ended up in Al’s favor. That one decision, probable as it was, pushed the nation further to the right. And in that one decision, an infinite amount of What Ifs, both big and small, began.

While I’m not arguing that 9/11 wouldn’t have happened on President Gore’s watch, I am thinking that the reaction and response from the American government would not have been the same. I find it highly unlikely, for example, that Gore has a legal team to draft the Patriot Act (in fact, he called for its repeal in 2003) or memos on torture. I’d like to believe a directional response would have happened from the man who invented the internet.

Clinton’s America was a center-right nation. “The era of big government is over” is not something one might think a liberal would crow about. Then again, listening to today’s Democrat leadership, you might actually think they were more traditional Republicans than liberal Democrats.

But a Bush presidency, after being attacked, wrapped itself in patriotism and surveillance; and moved the goalposts. He got some help, as the idea of a Republican-controlled America filled volumes of National Review issues and had been a wet dream for conservatives since the New Deal. The deep network of business (both Main and Wall Streets) and media (reminder, the media is not liberal; it’s a myth created by Republicans in the 1970s) allowed Republicans to control both the message and the medium. And it was working until it wasn’t, which is to say it worked for the very few and not the very many, and then the global economy collapsed.

Out of the ashes, there was hope. Hope in an erudite president; hope in regulatory environment that would protect us; hope in change. We had a moment where we could dream big: What If?

Of course, it’s just as easy to imagine that if Gore wins, it’s also likely Obama doesn’t become 44. Which means it’s also highly likely Trump doesn’t descend down the gilded escalator unleashing his particular abhorrent brand of chaos and destruction over the coming decade. But as an avid baseball fan, I know not to assume the double play.

While life is a series of unfortunate events, each moment passing the baton to the next moment, life is also luck. When my first child was born, in 2014, I wrote about life and luck, and still chuckle at how mathematicians figured out that to be alive is very much against the odds: “In 2011, Dr. Ali Binazir published a piece that calculated the probability of you or me or anyone existing was 1 in 10^2,685,000. That’s 10 followed by 2,685,000 zeroes.” Han Solo would blanch at those odds.

And now here we are, 25 years later. It’s always a tough day filled with tiny and not so tiny what ifs. We’ve spent the last quarter century living in the dark shadow of that brilliant sunny Tuesday.

For many of us, though, it’s a big marker of Life’s Big Moments; a moment that, as they might say, reverberates across time. I was 23 when the Towers fell, starting my first day of graduate school, which was, believe it or not, my only option. Graduating college the year before, at the peak of the dot com bust, I couldn’t find a job. Sure, I was in a promising local band, but even with my own delusions of grandeur, I never thought I was going to be a rock star. If I got lucky, maybe I could stretch it out as a career, playing sheds across the country during the summer and recording albums in between tours. This was my personal What If.

Alas, it was not to be.

My whole adult life has been managing crisis after crisis. The dot com bubble and burst, 9/11, two forever wars, the global financial crisis, Trump, Covid, Trump. It is, frankly, exhausting. And even though I’ve been laid off, fired, let go, terminated, pink slipped, four times between 2008 and 2020, as well as long working droughts here and there, I am one of the lucky ones. I’ve always managed to land on my feet. I am a cat.

But I think of that day, a quarter of a century ago, and it is hard to not play the What If game.

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If you’ve made it this far, oh my, thank you! Thank you for reading some very loose meandering thoughts on some things.