It’s pretty easy to know the winning lottery numbers after the lottery’s already been drawn.
Knowing shit after it’s already happened doesn’t make you clever. Or a psychic. Or a strategist. Or anything other than someone who states the fucking obvious.
No one knows what’s going to happen next. Literally no one. Even with all the indications, trends, patterns, graphs, information, historical data, we never know for sure. Not with absolute certainty. So if you’re one of those people who pretends they do, how about you pretend to shut the fuck up for a while instead?
And never have we seen this phenomenon more than with all the armchair experts and hindsight fortune tellers that have come out of the woodwork during the COVID19 shit storm.
“Oh, how did they not see that coming?” They didn’t see it it coming, because sometimes it’s only easy to see it was coming after it’s already fucking happened you fucking genius.
You know that word ‘unprecedented’? Look it fucking up. Yes, it’s been over used this year during a smorgasbord of shit storms, but there’s a reason it’s being used. Never, ever in the history of the planet have we had a global pandemic like this, in an environment like this. Ever. Literally fucking never. Not Spanish flu, bird flu, swine flu, regular flu, one flu over the cuckoo nest flu, or any other flu. So you don’t get to sit on your couch acting like you’re a fucking expert when shit goes wrong, saying you knew it was going to happen. Because you didn’t. At. Fucking. All.
Australia isn’t Spain isn’t Italy isn’t South Korea isn’t Singapore.
Victoria isn’t Tasmania isn’t South Australia.
2020 isn’t 2015 isn’t 1915 isn’t whatever year that other fucking thing happened.
Maybe you hypothesized, guessed, wondered, suspected, or worried it might happen. But you didn’t fucking know. How could you? Crystal ball? Middle name ‘Nostradamus’? Exactly. You were guessing just like everyone else. They guessed one way. You guessed another. You ended up being right. Good for you.
If you were in charge of making decisions, you’d have to guess as well. And not from your armchair with zero fucking consequences.
You’d have to do it before shit happened, knowing that 100s, 1000s, 10,000s of lives and livelihoods were relying on you to guess right.
You’d have to do it with all sorts of information available, truckloads even, but none of it ultimately conclusive.
You’d have to balance people dying of illness now with people dying by suicide later.
You’d have to balance all sorts of things that are actually, literally impossible to balance and reconcile. Impossible choices.
And you’d have to do it on the fly, based on often conflicting opinions about what the right thing to do is. And live with the consequences.
By all means, let’s hear it if you want to put your hand up and say your guess ended up being correct. But let’s not fuck around and pretend that despite your complete and utter lack of actual relevant scientific knowledge, and lack of access to relevant data, you somehow out-strategised the world’s best experts. You didn’t. You took a guess, and like a broken clock that’s right at least twice a day, you jagged one when no one’s life or livelihood was on the line. Go you.
So if you’re one of those people calling for someone’s head as if they’ve intentionally fucked things up instead of giving something their best shot while making impossible choices, maybe it’s time to quit pretending like you’d do a better fucking job if it was you. You wouldn’t. Although you’re right, that’s also just a guess. So you’ll never be able to prove me right or wrong. Just like all your stupid fucking know-it-all hindsight predictions going around right now.
And a confession in case you haven’t worked it out already: there’s a reason I’m writing ‘fuck thats’ and not ‘do this’s’, and it’s because it’s actually pretty easy to say what we shouldn’t do, and way more difficult to know what we should. It’s why I’m the first to admit I know pretty much fuck all and am simply working on the process of elimination, ruling out mistakes as I go, even though that leaves infinite other possibilities to fuck up.
It’s why I don’t pretend to have any, let alone all the answers, just, hopefully, some sort of half decent questions some of the time. Because… fuck. that.
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