what if...?

What does it really matter? You read it or hear it all the time; What if…? To me what if, as far as the past is concerned, never happened so why bother with it. What if I was never born? What if my father married someone else? What if the South won the war? Sure it might be fun to think about every now and then but to me it is not a serious question. In my amateur understanding of the universe no action or event is entirely without cause or effect so to capitulate the notion of one act or event not happening is submit too that the events surrounding it must have never happened or must not have gone down the way they did, and according to the law of snowballs this can have a very serious impact. The example of “what if I was never born?” leads me to think of the classic Jimmy Stewart movie It’s a Wonderful Life. I think the movie does a nice job of capturing the complete change of an entire town in one what if. It is like a completely separate dimension. With each event building on the next in time to remove or alter one is to affect all that proceed. To ask if there would be slavery today if the South had won the Civil War, or if you could have had a chance with a girl (or boy) if you had done something a little different are not, in my opinion, accurate questions. There may be stipulations in which it is appropriate but no event, as individuals, stands alone being affected by only one thing, one instance. Furthermore, that fact is that it didn’t happen so why fret it. As said by Disney, “hakuna matata!”