Ubiquity
Excerpt
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing
between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
History is the science of things which are never repeated.
—Paul Valéry
It was 11 a.m. on a fine summer morning in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, when the
driver of an automobile carrying two passengers made a wrong turn. The car was
not supposed to leave the main street, and yet it did, pulling up into a narrow
passageway with no escape. It was an unremarkable mistake, easy enough to make
in the crowded, dusty streets. But this mistake, made on this day and by this
driver, would disrupt hundreds of millions of lives, and alter the course of
world history.
The automobile stopped directly in front of a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb
student, Gavrilo Princip. A member of the Serbian terrorist organization Black
Hand, Princip couldn't believe his luck. Striding forward, he reached the
carriage. He drew a small pistol from his pocket. Pointed it. Pulled the trigger
twice. Within thirty minutes, the Austro-Hungar ... read full excerpt from: UBIQUITY ebook
