The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
If you could erase one event from history, what would it be?

All events have an impact, some large, some small. I know with a prompt like this, the inclination is to go for a big, historical event: Hitler or Stalin never coming to power, Franz Ferdinand avoiding assassination…

As horrid as the two world wars were, they were really just the latest in a long history of horrible events. The only reason they sit high in your mind is because they are more recent and better documented. So choosing to eliminate either of them doesn’t really change the history of horrible things humans have done, it just eliminates an example or two.

The other problem with choosing a massive event like a world war is that this long afterwards, our current culture has grown from those events. Oddly, there have been positives from that horror. Taking the horror away undoes the positives too.

A couple of examples: Human life is longer today, and we have so much better pharmaceuticals and medical treatment today directly because of those horrible world wars. Information technology (which should be a net positive for humanity) derives directly from the cold war, a direct off-shoot of World War Two. Violent crime and starvation are at historic lows in almost every country.

So if I’m going to erase an event from history, it’s going to be one much closer to today, one where I can see an immediate net benefit.

I’ve written about this before, when addressing the idea can one death actually change the world. The very good Apple+ TV series For All Mankind is based on the premise of what would happen if one key Soviet scientist had not died from appendicitis. This leads to the Soviets beating the Americans to the Moon, and all our futures are changed.

My example back in 2016, and still today a decade later, is much more current. I would save Bo Biden. Bo, the eldest son of then US Vice President Joe Biden Jr., died just as Barrack Obama’s second term was ending. Prior to Bo’s death, everyone expected Joe to run in 2016. Grieving for his son, Joe decided not to run.

Hillary Clinton became the Democratic party’s candidate for president. She couldn’t handle Donald Trump’s campaign, and lost. Trump became president.

The Democrats selected Hillary in part because she was what they saw as the only primary candidate who had a chance of pulling centrist Republicans from Trump. Republicans who thought Trump was too much needed a Democratic candidate who was closer to center than Bernie Sanders. the other strong primary candidate.

Trump hit her for being a woman (wouldn’t apply to Joe). He hit her for the Benghazi attack, which he may have applied to Joe, too, but Hillary was the poster child of that conspiracy. trump played up being macho, the idea that only a man could effectively be president. Obviously he couldn’t have done that with Joe. Joe drives sport cars, Joe loves trains (and anything with an engine). Compared to Joe, Trump was an effete poser in anything ‘manliness’ related.

The undecideds and centrist Republicans decided that Trump would be the better choice, that they could somehow control his worst impulses. After all, the US constitution is full of checks on power and ‘balances.’

Had Biden run in 2016, I do believe that he would’ve won. I don’t know that he’d have stood in 2020, and after three terms of a Democratic president, the voters would probably have voted for the Republican – American politics seems to work like that. But would the candidate in 2020 have been Trump? Again in US politics, the previous loser doesn’t usually get a do-over (although Trump did in 2024!). Who knows. Maybe it would have been Mike Pence, Marco Rubio, or Jeb Bush.

Whoever it was, the US wouldn’t today be threatening to annex Canada, Greenland, and Cuba. The lawless Roberts Supreme Court wouldn’t have Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, or Coney-Barrett. Imagine the US response to COVID being led by a science-forward leader…. And Joe would have his eldest son by his side as he fades away from us.