I Heard The News Today...

An era has come to an end.

After fifty years as Dictatore Supremo of Cuba, Fidel Castro is stepping down. The fact that he's lived long enough to do so is, of itself, surprising, America having spent the last half-century trying - and, by various means, failing - to assassinate him. His governance has been a geopolitical constant for so long that ending it is akin to the demolition of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union (an event which Castro himself survived, despite his reliance on their funds). The boards of history are being redrawn, one feels. We do not know what will happen next.

Human beings are narrow creatures. Deliberately or not, most of us spend our lives believing that the way things are now is the way they will always be, because ours is (surely!) the society for which the rest of history has been working. If we envisage future change, it tends towards one of four categories, viz:

1. Naively minimal - refining the status quo through better technology;
2. Hopefully progressive - hovercars, space travel, nuclear fission and green power;
3. Cynically dystopian - corruption and socio-economic divides after global cataclysm; or
4. Apocalyptic - end times, the Rapture, Ragnarok or other such death by explosion.

The problem with these models is twofold. Firstly, they are each contextually based on current perception: the naive minimalist doesn't comprehend the unknown; the hopeful progressive determines all future need based on currently percieved deficiencies; the cynical dystopian assumes that the worst of the status quo will endure; and the apocalyptic believes things are irrevocably going downhill. This is because - quite understandably - we cannot divorce ourselves from the present. It is foolish to assume that nothing of the current era will endure, but equally unreasonable to guess at what survives. There is, admittedly, nothing else to go on; and yet we forget the precariousness of predictions, assmuing (each in his own way) that this thing or that will never alter.

Secondly, however, is the problem of rogue elements - the ultimate catalysts for the above problem. There are several billion people on our planet, all of them acting individually and in hugely disparate circumstances. Throw in the necessity of coincidence, and it becomes impossible to tell what events are really shaping the future.

How, then, does any of this relate to Fidel Castro?

There are moments in life when we hear something new, experience something significant, and undergo the uneasy realisation that the world has altered; that our perceptions of future continuty, however intelligently founded a moment ago, are bunk. Often, these moments of epiphany are shared across a wide-ranging consciousness, sparked by a single event. John F. Kennedy's assassination. September 11. Man walking on the moon. The end of the French Revolution. And whenever it occurs, some small part of us is either rattled or elated: despite the breadth of global possibility, despite the laws of time and the passage of history, we had never really believed this thing could happen.

And now it has.