1) I'm going to try to describe a concept that fascinates me but I've discovered it is difficult to explain to people. I tried a time back explaining to friends on Facebook and there was not a lot of recognition. But all of you are intelligent and attractive people, so here goes.
2) There is, in history, occasionally a type of event that can have massive local or far wider effects, but which takes X amount of time to unfold, and in the meantime, for people whom it has not yet affected--but which it inevitably will--life goes on more or less normally.
3) When such an event took place in the past, and we are looking at it from the present, it can evoke strong impressions or emotions, because we--with that advantage of hindsight--know what will happen to the people not yet affected at the beginning.
4) Essentially, what I am describing is the gap between when an event starts to unfold and when it actually has its most widespread and devastating effects, and the feeling that are evoked in us when we look at people living in that gap. Let me give some examples.
5) One example, in the narrowest time frame, is the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers. The first plane hits, starting an unfolding chain of tragedy and catastrophe, but not everybody who will eventually be affected by it has even a slight grasp of it yet. Indeed, even some people
6) in the first tower hit may know that something has happened, but not what, or that it is deadly serious, and some may for a while go about their business until the unfolding effects begin to impact them directly. Another narrow example is the Titanic disaster. The iceberg
7) hits, but few people are initially aware of what happened or what it portends. Many go on doing whatever it is they were doing, but the unfolding shock wave of causality will envelope more and more of them over time as the consequences of the collision play out.
8) A very broad example might be the Fall of France in the spring of 1940. On May 10, the German army launched its major offensive on the western allies, choosing a line of attack through the Ardennes forest, for which the French were quite unprepared. Once the Germans
9) successfully crossed the Meuse River, the Allied cause in France and the Low Countries was essentially doomed--but only a few people realized at first and for most of the British, French and Belgian soldiers still fighting, it was business as usual. France was *going to fall*
10) but it had not yet fallen. And in that gap between the crossing of the Meuse and the actual Allied collapse, there were civilians (and soldiers) living their lives, eating breakfast, reading newspapers, until such time as the unfolding event--the tsunami of causality--
11) eventually encroached onto their lives, days later. But we, who know what will happen, because it already did happen, years ago, are time traveling spectators fully aware of what their future will hold.
12) I mention this, of course, because of the coronavirus. Until just this week, it had little effect on the lives of most Americans. Now, as events have unfolded, it is starting to have an effect, but mostly in the form of closings and runs on hand sanitizer, etc. As the event
13) continues to unfold, it will affect more of us in more and different--and perhaps dire--ways. And we are not time travelers from the future, so we don't yet know what our individual or collective fates might be, i.e., how bad things might--or might not--get. All we know is
14) is that the event is unfolding, and of course, we are trying to shape the unfolding of that event as best we can. Hopefully, future folks looking back on this will not look back in the same "foreboding doom" sense that I described in some of my examples.
