Man, all these people comparing the pandemic/quarantine to 9/11 but it's more like the beginning of World War I, where everything was balanced on this ridiculous precarious edge and then something happened to tip the balance and the entire world changed without ppl realizing

Like when the dominoes all began falling people were like "ah we'll be done by Christmas" because they were all trapped in an outmoded perception of a world that no longer existed. They thought there'd be a "normal" to return to, that the war was an aberration

Rather than the logical culmination of decades of absolutely awful and short-sighted politics by leaders more invested in their own egos than in actually leading countries.

I think in the US we underestimate the impact of World War I because we didn't come in until the end and World War II immediately overshadowed it but in Europe, the First World War was the end of a collective fever dream of the powerful with nothing to take its place