We’re all sometimes captivated by the “what-ifs” of history: You know: What if Hillary Clinton hadn’t all but ignored campaigning in the Upper Midwest in in 2016, and so hadn’t lost those states to Donald Trump. Or what if the people who tried to poison Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1930 had realized that he was vegetarian, and so wasn’t interested in the deadly repast that might have spared the world his “Final Solution.”
But wishing is passive, not to mention useless when the wishes involve what’s already done. Fantasizing about what-ifs can lull us into a lazy failure to face reality.
People who make a difference, by contrast, confront adversity with imagination and energy. Instead of grasping for what was or imagining what might have been, they go on from where they are, even if they face one setback after another.
Take, for instance, the series of events set in motion on a June morning in 1892, when Homer Plessy boarded a “whites only” car of the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans. Plessy was fair-skinned, but because he had a Black great-grandparent, he was convicted of violating a state law requiring separate train accommodations by race.
Instead of paying a fine, Plessy and his supporters carried his case to the U.S. Supreme Court – where they were slapped down by a 7-1 declaration that the Constitution didn’t require society to tolerate what the court called “a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”
That affirmation of segregation was tragic. It delayed by decades any progress toward America’s recovery from the national sin of slavery. It was more than six decades before the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, effectively ruled against segregation. And despite all the progress in the fight for equity, race remains a dominant divide in the nation.
So we might wonder where our country might be today if the reckoning with racial inequity hadn’t been delayed by those post-Plessy decades. What lives might have been spared? What minds might have not been poisoned if they hadn’t been conditioned to hate by America’s legally sanctioned tolerance of racism?
Today, there are what-ifs surrounding another issue that bedevils us: gun violence.
Like racial injustice in the Jim Crow era, gun violence has been enabled by elected officials and given constitutional cover by the Supreme Court. The egregious court action on guns came in 2008, in a 5-4 ruling on the so-called Heller case, written by Antonin Scalia. It held that the 2nd Amendment protects any individual’s right to own guns. That changed the presumption of 20th century courts that gun rights derived from a connection to state militias.
Over the past 15 years, this Heller ruling has made sensible gun control, which most Americans favor, seemingly impossible to enact. And so you speculate: What if a less influential jurist had sat in Scalia’s chair? What if a single Supreme Court vote had switched? It might have changed the trajectory of gun violence in America.
Yet focusing on those “what-ifs” risks overlooking the “because-ofs” – what happened because of a particular adversity. In the case of the Jim Crow era, we note those who fought on — notably, the Black Americans who remained resilient in the face of injustice, and those of all races who over the years carried on the effort to make America live up to the ringing rhetoric of equality in its founding documents. That work goes on.
Maybe Americans decades from now will look back on today’s gun culture the way we look at the Jim Crow era, as a tragic but bygone time. Perhaps from today’s political impasse over gun regulation, a movement of angry citizens will arise – perhaps aligning the fighters for equity in society with those focused on an end to runaway gun violence.
But there is no time to waste. Failing to move forward from here risks leaving us dulled to the gun slaughter for decades, just as white Americans for most of the 20th century were numbed to the reality of racism. We should be able to do better than our ancestors did.
Maybe, the courts and Congress notwithstanding, the horrible toll of gun violence will fall someday because citizens will demand change. And the “what-ifs” will arise only as historical footnotes, not as the anguished wishes for a better day that they are now.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.