How will you know it is a day when your whole world is about to change? I thought about that often since I read this BBC piece, the life changing day World War Two began for the English. Some at the time knew their world was about to change dramatically. For many, the day seemed like any other.
Something similar is related in the first chapter of the book Stalingrad, by Antony Beevor. Germans in Berlin hearing about the start of their war with Russia likely knew their world was going to change for the worse, though the day of the announcement was a pleasant one.
Did the Viennese at the Funeral of Franz Joseph above know their world was ending on that day? After all, the Emperor considered himself “the last ruler of the old world”, and with his death, the old world and Vienna’s place in it was to go as well? I don’t know.
Maybe our world is changing dramatically now and we are still living like it hasn’t. We are good at that. The Great Recession occurred and governments took drastic action and then went back about our business like it never happened. The same occurred with great COVID-19 pandemic: we all took great steps to deal with it, like a car swerving around a big pothole before regaining its place on the road. Perhaps that will be the case with climate change.
Or perhaps the world is different now, the way it was different on that September 3rd day in England, 1939. Pick your climate change disaster day, be it the Los Angeles fires of January, 2025, or some other day recent day. When you are older, you may look back on that day and think: that’s the day the world changed, and we didn’t really feel it.
(Bottom photo of LA during the fires of January 2025 by Mark Abramson for The New York Times)
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