Pandora's Box

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/british-soldier-allegedly-spares-the-life-of-an-injured-adolf-hitler

“What if?”

It’s a short and simple question that panders into the deepest depths of our minds and inner-most folds of our souls.  It really is profound how a question of two words can have such application to an almost seemingly infinite range of topics.

-What if certain events within the creation and expansion of the cosmos not have transpired in the way it did?  Would the recipe have been just right for our planet to form, no less, form with conditions favorable to conspire our existence?

-What if the asteroid of the Chicxulub impact never hit Earth?  Were pre-historic animals (dinosaurs) and plant life to continue, unabated, would we be here in our present state?

-What if President Lincoln had not been shot and killed at Ford’s Theater in Washington D.C., the night of April 14, 1865?  Would Reconstruction and the years to follow have sailed a smoother course?

-What if I had never fallen in love?  (Yes, let it sink in.  Almost all of us can plead the fifth on asking ourselves that.)

But a curious ‘What If’ that leads me to write this post is due to recently seeing a scene from the History Channel’s Series, “The World Wars.”  As the alleged story goes, were Private Henry Tandey to have killed Adolf Hitler during World War I, would the world be a different place today?  His refusal to do so could be seen as a unique moment of compassion in the context of war; compassion for a fellow man, vulnerable as a sitting target to be put down with only the tug of a finger.  Yet Private Tandey had chosen to let Hitler go.

The universe can be a strange place sometimes.  It may be naïve to think how the split second decision by a man left history to walk down either one of two paths. Were Tandey to have killed Adolf Hitler, would the events of World War II have occurred?  It may be wishful thinking to contemplate.  Skeptics may even have a field day arguing 2 of an infinite realm of possibilities:

1.    The world would have been a better place and the atrocities of World War II, and maybe even World War II itself, would have never taken place.

Or…

2.     World War II would have still taken place, with Hitler’s role under the guise of another man or woman, possibly even more sadistic and more evil than Hitler.  The world’s causalities would far exceed what the actual transpired World War II death toll was and possibly the world would be in far worse shape than it is now.

“What if?”

Asking this question will never give us a definitive answer. It will forever leave us with a gaping hole the moment we seek to clarify it.  Pure incompleteness. But I feel such a question can never attribute itself to an answer.  Nor was it meant to and nor will it ever.  ‘What if’ to us becomes our Pandora’s Box. It's a box that's never meant to be open, less it is, spews in this context nothing we could ever grasp, fathom, understand, or realize. But like the box in the myth, our box spills out one last thing indifferent to the rest before it too: Hope. 

To which case I'll gladly ask:

What if the world achieved a co-existing peace?