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Have you ever stopped to think about the what-ifs that happen to you on a daily basis? I'm talking about the things that happen to you in your everyday life that, if they had gone just a little bit differently, could have meant a dramatic change in the trajectory of your very being. Who's in charge here, anyway? I'm Jim Poling, and this is my view from the Middle East. So the other day I'm driving over to Lopes. I stopped at a stop sign waiting to make a turn. Traffic clears and I lift my foot off the brake and start for the accelerator when all of a sudden a guy on an e-bike comes zooming across right in front of me. Didn't stop at the intersection, never even slowed down. I quit hit the brake pedal again and he just kept right on going. I guess he felt that since he was on an e-bike that standard traffic laws, or even common sense laws... Don't apply to him, and we all need to watch out for him. I had a similar thing happen to me a few months back at another intersection with an elementary school-aged kid on a regular bicycle. This time I actually hit the kid's bike with the front of my car, knocking him to the ground. My reaction was quick, and the car lurched only a few inches and just tapped the kid's bike just enough to send him flying. Aside from being a little shook up, the kid was okay, and his bike was even okay. But he was cruising along fast enough so that in the second it took me to look to the right for traffic, then to the left, he appeared out of nowhere zooming from right to left in front of me. He didn't stop or slow down for the intersection. He just kept plotting ahead. He knew and I knew he should have stopped, but that was all hindsight at that point. Have you ever been driving and something happens? Someone cuts you off or a pedestrian or a bicyclist jumps out in front of you and you react and just barely avoid an accident and a close call? Ever stop to think, what if I hadn't seen that car or that pedestrian in time? How would that have altered their life and yours? I've thought about that a lot here recently. Our city has a real problem with bicycle accidents and e-bike incidents. These examples are why. Even though I knew it was the kid's fault, I still felt terrible about it. After all, he was just a young kid. Thank God he didn't get hurt. Hopefully the experience taught him a lesson, though, so a more serious incident will be avoided in the future for him. A psychologist would probably tell you it's not healthy to dwell on this stuff. Too much of it could drive you batty. But we've all had these type of incidents, and if they had gone just a tiny bit differently, a big life-changing impact could have been experienced by all concerned. There have been many historical what-ifs, too, that, had they gone differently, could have affected all of our lives. Here are a few examples in no particular order. What if, in World War I, Adolf Hitler, fighting the war as a soldier, had bought it with a bullet? Would World War II have ever happened? Hitler wasn't the only one upset about how Germany was treated by the Treaty of Versailles, but was there anyone fanatical enough and influential enough to take on the role he did, rise to power the way he did, or become bent on world domination the way he did? And what about the Holocaust? Would six million Jews have survived instead of being incinerated? What if, ahead of December 7, 1941, the U.S. military had acted on intelligence gathering and moved the Pacific Fleet out of Pearl Harbor so that no battleships were able to be targeted when the bombers flew in? Or what if Japan had decided against the Pearl Harbor attack altogether? How would that have affected the United States getting into the war? Would we have declared war on Japan? And if not, would Hitler have declared war on the U.S.? And if we hadn't gotten into the war, what would have happened to Great Britain and the rest of Europe? What effect would that have had on Hitler's so-called final solution for the Jewish problem? My guess is it would have been much worse had the U.S. not entered the fray when it did. Historians tell us that the only reason Hitler didn't actively develop a nuclear weapon was because most, if not all, the nuclear scientists in Germany were Jewish. What if that wasn't the case, or somehow Hitler didn't care about that? Would he have gotten the bomb first and used it? During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, What if John F. Kennedy hadn't been president? What if he hadn't been elected or had been assassinated earlier? He and Bobby Kennedy were the only ones who didn't want to invade Cuba to take out the missiles, probably because of the blowback they got from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Many have said that if Eisenhower, Nixon, or Johnson had been president, we would have invaded instead of setting up a quarantine. And while we're thinking about it, what if the Bay of Pigs debacle had never happened? Without that horribleness looming in the back of their minds, they've opted to invade Cuba during the crisis. Now here's the rub. We found out that after the missile crisis was over, that unlike what our sources had told us, the Russians actually did have nukes ready to fire on us from Cuba at the touch of a button, and probably would have pushed that button the moment our troops landed. Also, there was a Soviet submarine with active nukes ready to fire on us during the crisis. The U.S. Navy was dropping depth charges all around the sub as a warning, but the sub's commander thought that meant World War III had begun and ordered a nuke to be fired. Luckily for everyone, they needed approval from three officers to fire the torpedo and could only get approval from two. What if that third officer had given the go-ahead to fire? What if, on November 22, 1963, JFK hadn't been shot? What if Lee Harvey Oswald just flat-out missed when he took his shot? What would that have meant for the Vietnam War, the country, Cuba, and the space program? What if NASA had decided to bag the Apollo space program after the Apollo 1 fire? Would we have ever made it to the moon? Would the Soviets have landed there first? And if they had, what would that have meant for our national security? What if the Apple board of directors hadn't decided to hire Steve Jobs back in 1996? The company was only months away from bankruptcy at the time. What would a no-Steve Jobs Apple have meant for our lives today with no iPhones, iPads, iMacs, or iPods? Would we be carrying Blackberries or Microsoft phones? Or what if the attempt to take out Osama bin Laden had been successful in 1998? Would the 9-11 attacks ever been planned? Or failing all that, what if SEAL Team 6 had failed to locate and take out bin Laden in 2011? Would there have been even more 9-11 style attacks around the globe? What if Al Gore had won the presidency in 2000? If a few hundred votes and a couple of hanging chads had swung differently in Florida, that would have been the case. It probably would not have forestalled the 9-11 attacks, but what would it have meant for the post-9-11 response in Iraq and Afghanistan? And would that response, or lack of it, have resulted in even more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil? What if we managed to foil the 9-11 hijackers' plans and the World Trade Center was not destroyed? Or what if the passengers on board United Airlines Flight 93 had not overpowered the hijackers and crashed the plane in Pennsylvania? Would it have gone on to its intended destination, thought to have been the U.S. Capitol building or maybe the White House? What if Hurricane Katrina had wobbled just a little bit to the left or right and didn't hit New Orleans in 2005, causing the levees to eventually break, flooding the entire city? And what if COVID-19 hadn't leaked from the Wuhan lab or open market or wherever they finally determined it started and become a global pandemic? What if the COVID lockdowns hadn't taken place? Okay, so let's back up a moment and talk about space. I mentioned the Apollo program a minute ago. This is a story that is fascinating yet disturbing and infuriating all at the same time. It involves the original rocket man, Wernher von Braun. You probably know that von Braun was the genius behind the rockets that sent man to the moon. But what you may not know is that von Braun was a Nazi, an SS officer under Der Fuhrer Adolf Hitler during World War II. Told you this was disturbing. It gets worse. Von Braun and his team, working at the top secret lab at Pinamunda in the Baltic coast, developed the V-2 ballistic missiles that pummeled Britain and France during the war, killing between 5,000 and 9,000 civilians and military personnel. When the Royal Air Force bombed the joint in August of 1943, the Nazis moved the lab underground to a facility built by concentration camp slave labor near Nordhausen, Germany. The terrible conditions at the middle work facility, as it was called, resulted in an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 deaths among the workers due to exhaustion, starvation, and abuse. Von Braun continued to work mostly at Peenemunde, but made frequent trips to middle work and actually had a hand in the decision-making of about the slave labor. See? Worse. In early 1945, von Braun realized that Germany was going to lose the war, so he and his team left for the Austrian Alps, where they surrendered to the U.S. forces. He reportedly did this to avoid having to do so to the Russians. He also figured the U.S. was more likely to fund his rocket building activities. The United States was desperate to get von Braun's missile technology for military purposes and so initiated a top-secret program called Operation Paperclip that brought in the Rocket Man and 1,600 of his colleagues between 1945 and 1959. By the way, von Braun, although never really offering any kind of public apology or a show of remorse for his involvement with the slave labor at the V2 facility, had indicated that he was a pragmatist and an apolitical scientist only playing the Nazi game to secure funding and resources for his rocket research. Anyway, had any part of this gone hinky, von Braun could have been forcefully captured by the Allies or killed in an air raid, or the top-secret operation could have gotten fouled up, maybe someone in the government may have gotten a conscience about the stuff von Braun had been doing as a Nazi and and just locked them up with the rest of the war criminals, any number of things, then the Saturn V rocket that put the Apollo astronauts on the moon in July of 1969 probably would never have been built. How's that for a what-if? Okay, now, so let's get personal. What if the first radio station to hire me wasn't an all-news radio station, and I kept searching until another station, probably a music station, hired me as a disc jockey? After all, that's what I wanted to be. But I was hired at a station that didn't have disc jockeys. That led to a career in radio news and eventually management that kept me in the same job for 36 years, almost unheard of for the radio business. Disc jockeys get fired a lot. I doubt the outcome would have been the same. And what if my health insurance provider in 2010 hadn't required that I take a physical and as a result they hadn't discovered my prostate cancer early as a result? I never would have gotten the physical on my own without the requirement and I had no symptoms that would have alerted me to the cancer. As it was, I was diagnosed, treated, and eventually cured. And what if things had turned out differently in August 2017 when a woman staring at her phone t-boned my car as I was making a turn? As it was, my car was totaled, but I walked away without a scratch. There was an episode of the old original Star Trek TV series in which Dr. McCoy, the ship's physician... injects himself with some weird serum, goes nuts, and then runs through this time portal thingy, sending him back to Earth during the Great Depression. He meets this woman named Edith Keeler, and during one of the timelines, he saves her from being killed by being hit by a car. Turns out this woman was a peace activist, or at least was going to be a peace activist if she had survived. And because she did survive in this alternate timeline, she went on to convince the President of the United States to delay the U.S. entry into World War II. This gave Adolf Hitler the time he needed to create a nuclear bomb, which then gave him the power to conquer the world. The result was that none of the events that sent man into space was allowed to transpire, and everything in the present vanished. In our episode, our heroes Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock had to go back in time and stop McCoy from saving the woman. so that all that stuff didn't happen, and Hitler didn't conquer the world, and everything went back to normal, and they could continue their never-ending mission to explore strange new worlds. I know, I know, these time-space continuum things can give you a headache. But the point is, one little thing, slightly sent askew, can make for cascading changes that can mean big problems or big benefits. That last example was fiction, of course, but there are plenty of real scenarios that can change the outcome of things as well. I've talked before about God things. I think what we sometimes think of as coincidences are really God things. If you've seen my MyViewFromTheMiddle.com website or Facebook posts, you've seen the graphic I use that shows guardrails along the side of a long and winding road. There's a reason I use that graphic. We have free will to do what we want, but I believe that God puts up guardrails along our path to keep us running on the straight and narrow, a.k.a. keeping us in the middle, to allow things to happen according to his plan, not ours. You may think you're in charge of things, but you may want to reconsider that stance. I'm sure atheists and agnostics will somehow poo-poo any notion that God played a role in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis, or preventing Hitler from developing a nuke, or keeping me from becoming a disc jockey, but that divine intervention is more obvious to me now than it ever has been in the past. Our understanding as earthly creatures is severely limited, so we can't understand why God allowed the Holocaust, why he allowed the 9-11 attacks, or why he allowed the COVID pandemic. And if he allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor just to be sure the U.S. entered World War II, ultimately preventing Hitler's overthrow of Europe, But wouldn't it have been easier, and a lot less deadly, to whisper in Franklin Roosevelt's ear? I trust that when we reach the pearly gates that the reasons for these things will come clear. In the Bible, in John 16, verse 33, Jesus says, In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world. When you don't understand the purpose of his plan, in the presence of your king, bow the knee. That's a praise song written by Chris Macon. But this isn't a Bible study or music lesson, nor do I propose that anyone lock themselves in their bedroom to avoid doing anything that could make things go wrong. God is going to steer things whether you want him to or not. If we spend all our time worrying about what-ifs, then nothing is going to happen except maybe get acid reflux. Besides, Jesus asks in the book of Matthew if worrying about things can add a single hour to your life. I think we know the answer to that. So there I am in the middle. sliding through my everyday life doing what I do, and dodging close call after close call. But I think we all know who's piloting our ship here, and it certainly isn't us. So maybe the best advice is to not think about this stuff at all, not to dwell on the negative. Do what you do, and let God do what he does to guide your life, and not worry about the what-ifs. I'm Jim Pulling, and that's my view from the Midlands. Thank you.