Imagine if Lee Harvey Oswald never went to Dealey Plaza in Dallas in November 1963. What if Bobby Kennedy was able to complete his run for the White House in 1968 or Martin Luther King Jr. was not assassinated that same year? What if Adolf Hitler was a better painter and there was no Nazi Party? What if there were no hanging chads in Florida in 2000, if the Supreme Court didn’t decide the outcome of that election and President Al Gore was able to pursue policies limiting the impact of climate change? What if the World Trade Center towers were still standing, the Great Depression never happened or the 1994 assault weapon ban never expired? Imagine if Donald Trump was so enamored by his 1987 visit to Moscow that he never left—or he was convicted and jailed for money laundering in the 1990s and Hillary Clinton was now completing her second term.
I find such “what ifs” fascinating, albeit usually deeply exasperating. With just a sharp turn here or a simple twist there, with just a few more voters deciding their vote mattered or a few more buyers acquiring an Austrian’s oil paintings, with one less mentally sick person choosing murder of a famous public person…oh, how different our world would be. Such reflections have a way of reminding us how fragile this life is, how hard it is to discern the deepest truths of why things turn out the way they do, and how important it is to act with responsibility and purpose. That doesn’t mean each of us could change the course of history, but then again, who’s to say we couldn’t? Knowing what you know now, what would you have done if you saw Sirhan Sirhan with a gun in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, found yourself at a Nazi rally in the early ‘30s where Hitler was ranting or attended the same flight school with several 9/11 terrorists?
So here’s the question: What historical moment would you change? Maybe it’s one of those I’ve already mentioned or something completely different. Perhaps it involves a single historical figure or a larger phenomenon like a war or a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina. Maybe you’re thinking about a recent event, something that happened sometime in the 20th century, or perhaps you’d like to venture back to Europe during the Middle Ages or ancient Jerusalem. In any case, I’m excited to read what intrigues you and why, and for this growing community to learn from each other. As always, please do be respectful toward each other’s comments.
Want to chat with me (and each other) for an hour? Later today, I will be introducing a live Q&A through Substack’s chat, exclusively for paid subscribers. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, I hope you’ll consider becoming one and joining the conversation.
*Photo: President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade is just minutes away from passing through Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Photo via Getty Images.
Lincoln assassination. More than anything else. Lincoln and Grant would have crushed the KKK. Made the Reconstruction strong. Black Americans would have gained an entire century of freedom and American life
I’ve thought about the hanging chads a hundred times since. Gore would have taken our country in a much more humanitarian direction, with climate concerns at the forefront. We have lost so much time and our country has been allowed to evolve into such a land of ignorance and greed. But, yeah, we can move forward from here and sometimes I think for us humans, things have to get ever threatening to motivate real change. So, here we are... Curious how the months ahead will shape up now that Mifepristone has been suspended. I, for one, will not accept this ruling and will fight for my daughter, daughter in law, and every woman’s health and bodily autonomy!
Hard to choose just one, but when Donald Trump became president I thought it would be the worst thing that happened to the country since the Civil War-but it’s been so much worse than I even imagined and it’s not over.
If Reagan never got elected, we would probably not have had Bush I and Bush II and so much of history that happened during those 5 presidential terms would possibly be different. Just one person not being elected could have prevented so much damage to our country.
Imagine if it had been raining 11-22-63? How about if we'd had Al Gore instead of Bush? We really can never know. BUT we do know what will happen if Trump is re-elected.
I thought the obvious would be the moment it was decided Trump had won the presidency over Hillary Clinton. For many, it's the radical change of their lifetimes. We still don't know if we'll get over it.
I’d go even farther back. The moment when the Founders decided to allow and make an industry of slavery. That would have resulted in a different country.
As a boomer with a clear early memory of Kennedy's assassination, it's hard not to feel like that launched a thousand other traumas, in a long chain. But yes, that is the first thing I thought of.
Al Gore as President would probably have made the greatest long term difference in the life of this planet! He would have started a renewable effort against climate change twenty years ago which by this time could have been well on its way to some success? All of us living today will not see the ultimate failure of an Earth with a livable climate but we are now far behind the curve to prevent it!
For me, the presidency of Donald Trump is a calamity that has so degraded us that we may no longer be the nation we think we are--or strive to be. That truth, decency, integrity, honesty, etc. have no value to the political classes is distressing to me and is ruinous to our social fabric. That so many have drunk his Kool-Aid makes me wonder if it is already too late.
I am old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination. Normally, I would have put the JFK and Lincoln assassinations as our two greatest tragedies and events to stop with a trip in a time machine. More recently, I think that the life and political career of the last presidency may be the poison pill that ends us. ANYTHING other than his reelection!
I have too many answers for this question, Steve. I really wish Hillary had won the electoral college. There was so much subterfuge and interference: Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg, Comey. What Trump destroyed during his tenure is immeasurable. The Covid deaths alone are horrifying. I was in elementary school when JFK was killed. It was unbearable. But when I think of what TFG did with his time in office, the hatred he sowed, Charlottesville, sharing Intel in the Oval after firing Comey; HELSINKI; falling in love with KJU, his corrupt Cabinet, and what he urged his supporters to do to our Capitol, the deaths, disability, trauma and enduring rancor and division: that is my answer. I can’t think of anything like it.
Mine is obvious. I wish Hitler had never been born so 6,000,000people and their descendants would have lived to contribute their music, literature, and ideas to the world. Our lives would be so much richer.
So many things have happened since Kennedy's assassination that, if reversed, could have changed this country for the better. I'm 63 and lived thru it all, tho I was a child when this happened to Kennedy. I remember my mother, a republican, crying her eyes out because she voted for him and loved his ideas and ways. I do think the worst that has happened is the last 7 yrs with Trump. He's opened pandora's box of bad things after we had progressed forward some. I feel we are right back in the 60's again. Life would be so much better if Kennedy had lived. All the way thru to not electing Trump the facist.
I often refer to 1968 as the year America died, so it would be the trio of assassinations: MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. Their deaths each in their own way put an end to so many of the hopes and dreams of the early 60s and twisted the country in a direction that brought us the religious/political Taliban of the far right.
Apr 8, 2023·edited Apr 8, 2023Liked by Steven Beschloss
ALL of the things you mention I would change. But also, the US would never have gotten involved in VietNam, and we definitely never would have gone after WMDs in Iraq, just to stoke Dubya's ego.
Katrina was devestating for my family and state but my brilliant “governor sil” did a remarkable job reopening Louisiana though it ended a very long, otherwise successful political career. BUT the one thing I would chg is the 2016 election. Hilary should have been Pres!! Results have been so costly! He has torn our nation and families apart!
I’ve seen and read too many sci-fi scenarios where a character changes something in the past and the present is entirely different (ex. Stephen King’s “1963”). And not for the better. So no, I would NOT change anything. Citizens United CAN be changed. We can do it now. Everything that’s bad today, we CAN change. We just have to muster up the will to do it. We CAN ban assault weapons. We CAN remove the insurrectionists from Congress. We CAN muzzle the criminal former guy and lock him up. We CAN impeach Thomas. We CAN demand the MSM report the good news about what Biden is accomplishing. We CAN implement the Green New Deal and save the earth. We CAN demand that all citizens have a vote. We CAN remove unfair gerrymandering. We CAN do all this without changing anything in the past. And we MUST do it.
Such a great question! I would say, briefly, that our country is born of deep traditions, initially from England and then from everywhere, but also born or deep discontent and rebellion. The land of the free, the home of the brave, and the land of sharply polarized factions. Respect for authority is deep. But so is rebellion and rejection of authority. Meanwhile, it's (always) a good time to quote Hume reminding us of how short a history we have, and how much there is to learn:
ESSAY XII. Of Civil Liberty:
THOSE who employ their pens on political subjects, free from party-rage, and party-prejudices, cultivate a science, which, of all others, contributes most to public utility, and even to the private satisfaction of those who addict themselves to the study of it. I am apt, however, to entertain a suspicion, that the world is still too young to fix many general truths in politics, which will remain true to the latest posterity. We have not as yet had experience of three thousand years; so that not only the art of reasoning is still imperfect in this science, as in all others, but we even want sufficient materials upon which we can reason. It is not fully known, what degree of refinement, either in virtue or vice, human nature is susceptible of; nor what may be expected of mankind from any great revolution in their education, customs, or principles.
If Nixon is elected POTUS in 1960, there is no JFK assassination, potentially no Vietnam buildup (Ike would’ve had more influence), and therefore no Pentagon Papers, no Watergate, since the latter two were offshoots of Vietnam.
I wish I had a Time Machine. I would have gone back and changed as many awful events that I could. However, who knows how that would have affected subsequent events.
I have to go with either George W. Not being elected or 9/11 not happening. The US was at its pinnacle of power, and 8 years of Bush’s incompetent leadership left the country in debt and grievously wounded our American exceptionalism. Obama did what he could given obstructionism, but Trump killed any vestige of American exceptionalism. We’re now known for mass shootings rather than freedom and opportunity.
While I think we’d be further along with green energy had Carter gotten a second term and Gore won the presidency, we mustn’t forget that Tipper was, in many ways, a portent of Moms for Liberty. I think if I could do something, I’d want to prevent the conception and birth of Donald J Trump.
Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Take this singular moment away and the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, not to mention the rise of that painter in Austria which then led to the Holocaust and a 45 year Cold War would not have happened. The Austro-Hungarian Empire would still have cracked up at some point and there certainly could have been war between the great European powers in the years that followed but the world today would be vastly different if this one event did not happen.
There are so many. The invasion of this hemisphere by white Christians; witch trials; Lincoln, Hitler, the Depression, Gore & Hillary Clinton - but the one that is still hurting us most is the assassination of JFK. Maybe because it is one of my earliest memories, but that was a victory for Fascism in this country and in a very real sense, it was the end of the America FDR & Frances Perkins were building for us. Every Republican President since has been anti-democratic, corrupt, and has advanced a shift Rightward to our current state of looming Christo-Fascist threat. Richard Nixon was planning to give us a Basic Income that would have prevented a lot of suffering, but that ended with Watergate. I don't know. I see so much going wrong now, esp. the erosion of women's rights, not just in abortion and bodily autonomy, but in terms of fair sports, our rights to safety, privacy, and dignity. A lot of women no longer feel safe with either political party. It's a dark, sad time for women and girls and our Democratic President won't even publish the new Constitution containing the ERA. I'm off on a tangent. Sorry.
If I could change any event in the course of human history, it would be the creation of god, most specifically the creation of christianity. This faith has been the cruelest in the teaching and practices. Not just recent teaching. The very beginnings with the inquisitions starting in 1200 a mere 400 years after the bible was written. The church was already losing followers to other faiths, Lutherans, Protestains, and other christian type faiths. They came down with a very heavy hand to prevent free thinking, or believing in any other faith than the catholic doctrine. The church used the monarchs as their puppets to enforce the rules of the church claiming that a monarch was anointed by god. The christian faith has been the underlying cause of every war since the 11th century. The political social disruption in the United States today is being forced by people of the christian faith. Zealots who see again a losing of the flock and revenus they need to survive. Humans are moving aways from religious doctrine (they) religions are fighting back, implanting their beliefs into the political systems of many countries. You now see the raise of Muslims secs trying to be the one true sect, rewriting the words of Allah to rule with and take away freedom of thinking, and believing anything other than their authorized beliefs.
On a world stage, surveying all history, the reductive act of personifying the spiritual realm into a god/godesses , then using & clinging to these created entities as vehicles for human power differentials was the real Original Sin.
I can't make it just 1 historical event. There are several events that changed my coming of age, and recreated the world I thought I was inheriting. The JFK assassination took away my innocence, showed me that there can be real evil in the world, and that Camelot would not shape the years ahead. The MLK assassination, just a few months before my high school graduation, reminded me that although we thought we had made progress in the realm of Civil Rights, we really still had great bigotry and hate in this world. Then, just weeks before my high school graduation, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. That crushed my dream that there could be someone to carry on the legacy of JFK and RFK. I concluded my graduation speech with his words: Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream things that never were and ask why not. From these tragedies, I was motivated to become an activist in college, to try to make the world a better place as I believe these 3 men would have done. I continue this activism to this day, as a senior citizen, living each day, in different ways, in different areas, to try to make the world a better place.
The caste/class system prevalent in all the world along Patriarchy. If that hate and the privileges and entitlements inherent in. Patriarchy (which normalize the heat of women )had NOT got been allowed to fester and be codified in our societies and governments - I would posit none of the things listed, or any of the replies contained in the comments, would have occurred.
Perhaps the short answer is. I would remove HATE from our world.
The 2000 election without any doubt! If Gore had won and we hadn't had GW Bush--no Iraq War. There would have been a police action to get Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, but perhaps not even a war there either. From that election and those wars everything changed: the militarization of the country, the amount of blood spilled, trauma spread, and money spent is heartbreaking and historically decisive. No GW Bush, no Donald Trump. And by the way, no suspension of the assault weapons ban. If Gore had been in office, that would have been renewed, so we can thank Bush for that too--and he doesn't get held responsible for all the gun deaths since 2004, and he should.
I would go back and have the framers of the Constitution consider the impacts of their words beyond the small country they started. 13 colonies to 50 states is significantly different. The 2nd Amendment could be written much better. Lots of lives would be saved, and government could function better. Also, eliminate the filibuster in the Senate. It’s a useless obstructionist non-law rule.
I was born in 1955, making me 8yrs old in 1963..There have been important comments made here on this question..Lincoln, Citizens United, Al Gore, changing the present and thus the future..All solid yearnings..For me it is JFK, had he not been killed, had he continued on his journey, this country would have been put on a completely different path..perhaps preventing some the post 1963 events mentioned here..
I would like to have seen Carter over Reagan, Gore over Bush, of course Clinton over Trump. But what if McCain won? What would the country look like now?
I’ve always struggled with the concept of the Holocaust, so I think I’d choose to prevent the birth of Hitler. But then I started thinking about how many lives would have been saved if a compassionate human had been in the White House when Covid started. So I’d like to change my answer to preventing DJT from becoming president. He has caused incalculable damage to our country, not just Covid.
The shooting of Bobby Kennedy. He would have trounced Richard Nixon in November, and I believe his Presidency would have been a pivot point in American history
For recent events, what if Johnson hadn't supported the Vietnam war, and had won a second full term? After all the things he got through Congress in his first, what might he have accomplished in the second?
For earlier events, what if the northern states had refused to be pressured by the southern states into supporting the 2nd Amendment? How many lives would have been saved?
The ill-named Citizens United never EVER went into effect.
Lincoln assassination. More than anything else. Lincoln and Grant would have crushed the KKK. Made the Reconstruction strong. Black Americans would have gained an entire century of freedom and American life
I’ve thought about the hanging chads a hundred times since. Gore would have taken our country in a much more humanitarian direction, with climate concerns at the forefront. We have lost so much time and our country has been allowed to evolve into such a land of ignorance and greed. But, yeah, we can move forward from here and sometimes I think for us humans, things have to get ever threatening to motivate real change. So, here we are... Curious how the months ahead will shape up now that Mifepristone has been suspended. I, for one, will not accept this ruling and will fight for my daughter, daughter in law, and every woman’s health and bodily autonomy!
What I would change if given that power, is CARTER would have beaten Reagan. Who allowed Rupert Murdoch in, and we DO know what damage that caused.
Let’s change the present. We have the power to do so and thus change the future as well.
Hard to choose just one, but when Donald Trump became president I thought it would be the worst thing that happened to the country since the Civil War-but it’s been so much worse than I even imagined and it’s not over.
If Reagan never got elected, we would probably not have had Bush I and Bush II and so much of history that happened during those 5 presidential terms would possibly be different. Just one person not being elected could have prevented so much damage to our country.
Imagine if it had been raining 11-22-63? How about if we'd had Al Gore instead of Bush? We really can never know. BUT we do know what will happen if Trump is re-elected.
I thought the obvious would be the moment it was decided Trump had won the presidency over Hillary Clinton. For many, it's the radical change of their lifetimes. We still don't know if we'll get over it.
The pardoning of Richard Nixon. The idea that a class of people were above the law came from that act. (In my opinion)
I’d go even farther back. The moment when the Founders decided to allow and make an industry of slavery. That would have resulted in a different country.
As a boomer with a clear early memory of Kennedy's assassination, it's hard not to feel like that launched a thousand other traumas, in a long chain. But yes, that is the first thing I thought of.
Al Gore as President would probably have made the greatest long term difference in the life of this planet! He would have started a renewable effort against climate change twenty years ago which by this time could have been well on its way to some success? All of us living today will not see the ultimate failure of an Earth with a livable climate but we are now far behind the curve to prevent it!
The expiration of the assault weapons ban.
For me, the presidency of Donald Trump is a calamity that has so degraded us that we may no longer be the nation we think we are--or strive to be. That truth, decency, integrity, honesty, etc. have no value to the political classes is distressing to me and is ruinous to our social fabric. That so many have drunk his Kool-Aid makes me wonder if it is already too late.
I am old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination. Normally, I would have put the JFK and Lincoln assassinations as our two greatest tragedies and events to stop with a trip in a time machine. More recently, I think that the life and political career of the last presidency may be the poison pill that ends us. ANYTHING other than his reelection!
I have too many answers for this question, Steve. I really wish Hillary had won the electoral college. There was so much subterfuge and interference: Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg, Comey. What Trump destroyed during his tenure is immeasurable. The Covid deaths alone are horrifying. I was in elementary school when JFK was killed. It was unbearable. But when I think of what TFG did with his time in office, the hatred he sowed, Charlottesville, sharing Intel in the Oval after firing Comey; HELSINKI; falling in love with KJU, his corrupt Cabinet, and what he urged his supporters to do to our Capitol, the deaths, disability, trauma and enduring rancor and division: that is my answer. I can’t think of anything like it.
The idea of human chattel never became a reality. Slavery would never have happened anywhere in any history.
Leaving aside the political and military might-have-beens, it would have been nice if Mozart had died at, say, 75 rather than 35
Mine is obvious. I wish Hitler had never been born so 6,000,000people and their descendants would have lived to contribute their music, literature, and ideas to the world. Our lives would be so much richer.
So many things have happened since Kennedy's assassination that, if reversed, could have changed this country for the better. I'm 63 and lived thru it all, tho I was a child when this happened to Kennedy. I remember my mother, a republican, crying her eyes out because she voted for him and loved his ideas and ways. I do think the worst that has happened is the last 7 yrs with Trump. He's opened pandora's box of bad things after we had progressed forward some. I feel we are right back in the 60's again. Life would be so much better if Kennedy had lived. All the way thru to not electing Trump the facist.
December 15, 1791 when the Second Amendment was ratified.
Where would we be if Jimmy Carter had been relected?
I often refer to 1968 as the year America died, so it would be the trio of assassinations: MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. Their deaths each in their own way put an end to so many of the hopes and dreams of the early 60s and twisted the country in a direction that brought us the religious/political Taliban of the far right.
ALL of the things you mention I would change. But also, the US would never have gotten involved in VietNam, and we definitely never would have gone after WMDs in Iraq, just to stoke Dubya's ego.
Katrina was devestating for my family and state but my brilliant “governor sil” did a remarkable job reopening Louisiana though it ended a very long, otherwise successful political career. BUT the one thing I would chg is the 2016 election. Hilary should have been Pres!! Results have been so costly! He has torn our nation and families apart!
I’ve seen and read too many sci-fi scenarios where a character changes something in the past and the present is entirely different (ex. Stephen King’s “1963”). And not for the better. So no, I would NOT change anything. Citizens United CAN be changed. We can do it now. Everything that’s bad today, we CAN change. We just have to muster up the will to do it. We CAN ban assault weapons. We CAN remove the insurrectionists from Congress. We CAN muzzle the criminal former guy and lock him up. We CAN impeach Thomas. We CAN demand the MSM report the good news about what Biden is accomplishing. We CAN implement the Green New Deal and save the earth. We CAN demand that all citizens have a vote. We CAN remove unfair gerrymandering. We CAN do all this without changing anything in the past. And we MUST do it.
If hitler could sell his paintings, there would have been no holocaust.
Such a great question! I would say, briefly, that our country is born of deep traditions, initially from England and then from everywhere, but also born or deep discontent and rebellion. The land of the free, the home of the brave, and the land of sharply polarized factions. Respect for authority is deep. But so is rebellion and rejection of authority. Meanwhile, it's (always) a good time to quote Hume reminding us of how short a history we have, and how much there is to learn:
ESSAY XII. Of Civil Liberty:
THOSE who employ their pens on political subjects, free from party-rage, and party-prejudices, cultivate a science, which, of all others, contributes most to public utility, and even to the private satisfaction of those who addict themselves to the study of it. I am apt, however, to entertain a suspicion, that the world is still too young to fix many general truths in politics, which will remain true to the latest posterity. We have not as yet had experience of three thousand years; so that not only the art of reasoning is still imperfect in this science, as in all others, but we even want sufficient materials upon which we can reason. It is not fully known, what degree of refinement, either in virtue or vice, human nature is susceptible of; nor what may be expected of mankind from any great revolution in their education, customs, or principles.
If Nixon is elected POTUS in 1960, there is no JFK assassination, potentially no Vietnam buildup (Ike would’ve had more influence), and therefore no Pentagon Papers, no Watergate, since the latter two were offshoots of Vietnam.
I wish I had a Time Machine. I would have gone back and changed as many awful events that I could. However, who knows how that would have affected subsequent events.
I have to go with either George W. Not being elected or 9/11 not happening. The US was at its pinnacle of power, and 8 years of Bush’s incompetent leadership left the country in debt and grievously wounded our American exceptionalism. Obama did what he could given obstructionism, but Trump killed any vestige of American exceptionalism. We’re now known for mass shootings rather than freedom and opportunity.
While I think we’d be further along with green energy had Carter gotten a second term and Gore won the presidency, we mustn’t forget that Tipper was, in many ways, a portent of Moms for Liberty. I think if I could do something, I’d want to prevent the conception and birth of Donald J Trump.
Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Take this singular moment away and the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, not to mention the rise of that painter in Austria which then led to the Holocaust and a 45 year Cold War would not have happened. The Austro-Hungarian Empire would still have cracked up at some point and there certainly could have been war between the great European powers in the years that followed but the world today would be vastly different if this one event did not happen.
There are so many. The invasion of this hemisphere by white Christians; witch trials; Lincoln, Hitler, the Depression, Gore & Hillary Clinton - but the one that is still hurting us most is the assassination of JFK. Maybe because it is one of my earliest memories, but that was a victory for Fascism in this country and in a very real sense, it was the end of the America FDR & Frances Perkins were building for us. Every Republican President since has been anti-democratic, corrupt, and has advanced a shift Rightward to our current state of looming Christo-Fascist threat. Richard Nixon was planning to give us a Basic Income that would have prevented a lot of suffering, but that ended with Watergate. I don't know. I see so much going wrong now, esp. the erosion of women's rights, not just in abortion and bodily autonomy, but in terms of fair sports, our rights to safety, privacy, and dignity. A lot of women no longer feel safe with either political party. It's a dark, sad time for women and girls and our Democratic President won't even publish the new Constitution containing the ERA. I'm off on a tangent. Sorry.
If I could change any event in the course of human history, it would be the creation of god, most specifically the creation of christianity. This faith has been the cruelest in the teaching and practices. Not just recent teaching. The very beginnings with the inquisitions starting in 1200 a mere 400 years after the bible was written. The church was already losing followers to other faiths, Lutherans, Protestains, and other christian type faiths. They came down with a very heavy hand to prevent free thinking, or believing in any other faith than the catholic doctrine. The church used the monarchs as their puppets to enforce the rules of the church claiming that a monarch was anointed by god. The christian faith has been the underlying cause of every war since the 11th century. The political social disruption in the United States today is being forced by people of the christian faith. Zealots who see again a losing of the flock and revenus they need to survive. Humans are moving aways from religious doctrine (they) religions are fighting back, implanting their beliefs into the political systems of many countries. You now see the raise of Muslims secs trying to be the one true sect, rewriting the words of Allah to rule with and take away freedom of thinking, and believing anything other than their authorized beliefs.
On a world stage, surveying all history, the reductive act of personifying the spiritual realm into a god/godesses , then using & clinging to these created entities as vehicles for human power differentials was the real Original Sin.
I can't make it just 1 historical event. There are several events that changed my coming of age, and recreated the world I thought I was inheriting. The JFK assassination took away my innocence, showed me that there can be real evil in the world, and that Camelot would not shape the years ahead. The MLK assassination, just a few months before my high school graduation, reminded me that although we thought we had made progress in the realm of Civil Rights, we really still had great bigotry and hate in this world. Then, just weeks before my high school graduation, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. That crushed my dream that there could be someone to carry on the legacy of JFK and RFK. I concluded my graduation speech with his words: Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream things that never were and ask why not. From these tragedies, I was motivated to become an activist in college, to try to make the world a better place as I believe these 3 men would have done. I continue this activism to this day, as a senior citizen, living each day, in different ways, in different areas, to try to make the world a better place.
The caste/class system prevalent in all the world along Patriarchy. If that hate and the privileges and entitlements inherent in. Patriarchy (which normalize the heat of women )had NOT got been allowed to fester and be codified in our societies and governments - I would posit none of the things listed, or any of the replies contained in the comments, would have occurred.
Perhaps the short answer is. I would remove HATE from our world.
How about Cain doesn’t kill Abel??? And slaughter doesn’t become the norm!!!
If John Lennon was never killed. If he remained a symbol of peace into the 80s at least, I wonder how Baby Boomers would have been impacted.
The 2000 election without any doubt! If Gore had won and we hadn't had GW Bush--no Iraq War. There would have been a police action to get Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, but perhaps not even a war there either. From that election and those wars everything changed: the militarization of the country, the amount of blood spilled, trauma spread, and money spent is heartbreaking and historically decisive. No GW Bush, no Donald Trump. And by the way, no suspension of the assault weapons ban. If Gore had been in office, that would have been renewed, so we can thank Bush for that too--and he doesn't get held responsible for all the gun deaths since 2004, and he should.
I would go back and have the framers of the Constitution consider the impacts of their words beyond the small country they started. 13 colonies to 50 states is significantly different. The 2nd Amendment could be written much better. Lots of lives would be saved, and government could function better. Also, eliminate the filibuster in the Senate. It’s a useless obstructionist non-law rule.
I was born in 1955, making me 8yrs old in 1963..There have been important comments made here on this question..Lincoln, Citizens United, Al Gore, changing the present and thus the future..All solid yearnings..For me it is JFK, had he not been killed, had he continued on his journey, this country would have been put on a completely different path..perhaps preventing some the post 1963 events mentioned here..
I would like to have seen Carter over Reagan, Gore over Bush, of course Clinton over Trump. But what if McCain won? What would the country look like now?
I’ve always struggled with the concept of the Holocaust, so I think I’d choose to prevent the birth of Hitler. But then I started thinking about how many lives would have been saved if a compassionate human had been in the White House when Covid started. So I’d like to change my answer to preventing DJT from becoming president. He has caused incalculable damage to our country, not just Covid.
The shooting of Bobby Kennedy. He would have trounced Richard Nixon in November, and I believe his Presidency would have been a pivot point in American history
Native American Indians should never have traded their land for beads.
For recent events, what if Johnson hadn't supported the Vietnam war, and had won a second full term? After all the things he got through Congress in his first, what might he have accomplished in the second?
For earlier events, what if the northern states had refused to be pressured by the southern states into supporting the 2nd Amendment? How many lives would have been saved?
I’m still not over the then Florida Secretary of State stealing the election from Al Gore. That outcome is what I would change.
If Lincoln was not assassinated would blacks have at least be given a chance?