What people or events caused consequences beyond what was intended?
First:
If it weren’t for Lee Harvey Oswald, we’d still be using half-dollar coins bearing Benjamin Franklin’s portrait.
Bill Clinton appointed Andrew Cuomo as HUD Secretary, because, hey, he can make it easy for people to buy homes, and buying homes is a good thing. Global financial meltdown.
If it weren’t for the SDMB being down for maintenance yesterday, I may have never learned the true story behind the dog name, “Fido”.
Probably all of them.
I adopt cats; and therefore incur unintended veterinary bills.
I also got rear-ended years ago waiting to make a left turn into the vet’s one icy day (nobody hurt, just car damage). That delayed the person who hit me, which probably made her late for something and may have had repurcussions there; and may have affected her insurance rates, which may have meant that she didn’t buy something else, and so on, and so on.
Well, you could go down a rabbit hole with just about anything. Major events…hm. Ok, so, if it weren’t for mixed signals, Saddam wouldn’t have invaded Kuwait, which wouldn’t have had the US intervene, which wouldn’t have had Bush I form a coalition, which wouldn’t have had US troops in Saudi, paralleled with ObL and AQ offering to fix things then getting pissed off about the US having troops in Saudi, which wouldn’t have lead to Saudi basically joining the US coalition (along with many other ME states), which wouldn’t have lead to the US coalition crushing Iraq’s military, which wouldn’t have lead to ObL and AQ plotting to get back at the US, which wouldn’t have lead to the first Twin Towers attack, which wouldn’t have lead to the US trying (and failing) to kill ObL at various points, which wouldn’t have lead to 9/11, which, bringing it back full circle, wouldn’t have lead to the second Gulf War and the invasion and destruction of Iraq and the eventual execution of Saddam and the eventual death of ObL, as well as millions of dead either directly or in other spin offs in the region and trillions spent. We wouldn’t have gotten Obama, and we wouldn’t now have Trump. And all from something that was fairly innocuous at the start, which was that the US just wasn’t clear (deliberately) on what we would do or what our stance was wrt Iraq and Kuwait. Just like we were and until fairly recently have been wrt Taiwan…or countless other things. Our policy has been to be vague about a lot of our foreign policy and exactly what, if anything, we’d do, and this has lead to misinterpretation and error.
And you could tack on countless other things that have spun out of this. Syria. Arab Spring. Destabilization of many authoritarian regimes in the region and growing unrest. The list goes on and on as to the unintended consequences of this. I could tie this to the things that happened and are happening in Turkey, in Russia, in the Ukraine…hell, in our trade relations and trade war with China, as weird as that sounds.
I recently realized how much of my life has been shaped by my ex-boyfriend, even though we broke up eight years ago and have hardly had contact since.
I was living in Boston when we met; it was his idea to move to California. It was one of his friends who inspired me to go to law school, and I chose the school based on where we had moved to in SoCal. We broke up shortly before I started school, and I met my husband the first week of classes. I also met a friend, who also met her fiance there, and her fiance hooked me up with my current job, which I love.
While my ex and I were together, we did a Try Scuba experience together. That was also his idea, but I ended up loving it. I felt this was something I’d like to really get into someday; alas, it’s an expensive hobby, and I didn’t have much disposable income back then. A few months ago, I thought back to how much fun I’d had and realized, hey, I have a grown-up job now! I got certified and now I’m diving almost every weekend.
Also while my ex and I were together, I got pregnant. We talked it over and agreed an abortion was the right choice for us, though I think he felt more conflicted, or at least more upset about it than I did. I had been sort of vaguely pro-choice before that, but coming face-to-face with the reality of it all–the debilitating morning (ha! More like 24/7) sickness I suffered, the nightmare protesters outside the clinic, and the growing realization over the next decade of how that pregnancy could have derailed my life–all of that transformed me from a complacent liberal to a passionate advocate for reproductive justice. It didn’t happen overnight. One other thing that contributed was that, four years after my abortion, when my ex and I were in the midst of what turned out to be our breakup fight (about something unrelated), he decided to throw out one last jab about me killing a child. In a way, it was a favor to me, because I’d felt for some time that he wasn’t very nice to me, but I guess I didn’t feel like he was enough of a jerk for me to break up with him. That cleared things up real quick. I never looked back, and I eventually decided I needed to do more for women saddled with unwanted pregnancies by their unsupportive boyfriends than just give to Planned Parenthood. Now I volunteer as a clinic escort, which has been incredibly meaningful to me. I act as a human shield between the protesters screaming profanities at patients and trying to film them as an intimidation tactic, and I’ve given rides to women whose partners abandoned them at the clinic with no way home. I can never repay my gratitude to the wonderful escorts and staff who were there for me during that difficult time in my life, but I have the rest of my life to pay it forward.
So thanks, John. You were kind of a jerk sometimes, but I’m living my best life now because of you.
This is great, and the very best thing about it is something that I always try myself to remember - if you can’t pay it back, pay it forward.
j
Gavrilo Princip. 1914. Brought down a World Of Shit for the next 3 decades.
If McCarthy had not forced the State Dept. to get rid of its China experts (because they had “lost China to the Commies”, the US might have avoided Vietnam.
It didn’t stop with the end of WWII. Russia’s involvement in WWI proved so disastrous it led to the collapse of the Czar’s government, the Russian Revolution, and the victory by the Bolsheviks. From there, you have the rise of the Soviet Union, the spread of communism internationally (e.g., China), and the Cold War from 1945 to 1991. In the Middle East, the defeat and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire led to the Sykes-Picot Agreement which divided the region according to French and British imperial interests rather than those of its inhabitants thereby leading to conflicts that we’re still sorting out more than a century later.
Esprise Me, thank you for sharing your story with us. I admire what you are doing for women at the clinics.
Henry VIII broke with the Catholic church, which led to the Church of England which gave birth to the Puritan movement, which defined (and probably accelerated) the colonization of North America.
On a personal level, a buddy and I worked on the high school newspaper together and happened to choose the same college, where, during freshman orientation, my buddy said, “Hey, let’s see if we can try out for the student newspaper,” which started me on a career path, which led directly to my meeting my wife 10 years later, and here we are 38 years after that.
If it weren’t for my horse…
Yakov Sverdlov died of natural causes on March 16, 1919. He was 33 years old.
Sverdlov was a prominent figure in the Bolshevik Party and held a fairly high-ranking position in the new Soviet government. He was noted for his organizational skills and he ran the day-to-day administrative routine of the Communist Party.
When Sverdlov died unexpectedly, a lot of his administrative duties were passed on to one of his close associates - Joseph Stalin. Stalin used this new control over party organization to build up a personal power base. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin was able to use this power base to outmaneuver rivals and establish himself in full control by 1927.
If my mom weren’t burned over a large part of her body when she was about 5 she wouldn’t have met my dad and I wouldn’t be here. During her extended and painful hospital stay, the staff tutored her so well she was able to skip 2 grades, graduate high school at 16, move w/ her mom to another state at 18 when her dad passed and then meet my dad in that other state.
And right now you’d be staring at nothing and feeling pretty foolish.
One aspect of this you missed was how the USSR’s decision to invade Afghanistan in 1979 triggered a chain of events that lead to the creation of Al Qaeda.
Well, I didn’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole. You could also talk about has Saddam came to power, or the basically colonial partitioning by the Europeans in the post WWI era or…well, there are a lot of things that factored in, most of which were certainly unintentional. It just depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go…and whether you should take the red pill, or the blue pill…
ITYM 77 years (the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991). The rest of the century if you include the Balkans conflicts as the tail end.