There are 8 billion people in the world, and the only one who matters is Donald Trump. His influence in this country, in Europe, in the Middle East, and now in Latin America, is profound. How will history describe him? That is one question. Another is: how can 8 billion people let him get away with it? A third is: if he fell off the earth today, would everything come together or fall apart?

The world after Donald Trump is one which those of us in our 80s (that does sound old, doesn’t it?) will never really know. And that is what’s so sad about it all. We, each in our own way, have worked to build a better world. Sure, we may have failed more than we succeeded, but we could always hope that those coming after us could build on our accomplishments, and improve things where we have stumbled. Now, we see that the world we were building was fragile and that a slight jolt could set it in a different path. Many of our accomplishments would become irrelevant to this future world.

Of course, I think of Back to the Future, where Doc’s Delorean could time travel at will. But not only could it travel back in time (where, for example, Marty McFly could see his parents at their fateful high school prom), but it could travel forward to alternative futures, each apparently co-existing in alternative dimensions.

The future (or, better, the present) that Marty lived in was pretty much the present we know. But there were visits to an alternative, dystopian future, where might makes right, and everything is mired in chaos. There is a Donald Trump in that future (yes, not yet elected president), Biff Tannen. Biff was Marty’s father’s rival for the hand of Marty’s mother, and a rival whose tactics were, let’s call them, trumping. And in this alternative future, where Biff shined through the decay around him, he remained the model upon which today’s Donald Trump could have built his personal sense of morality.

Not only are we old folks condemned not to see the future, we are not really able to influence much the present. And, after all, the next 75 years or so will belong to our children and grandchildren, so shouldn’t they be in charge? Yes, but they are busy, building their careers, teaching their children, and yes, tending to us. They are inner focused as they should be. Only we elders have the time to worry.

And worry we do. I wish I had Doc’s Delorean. Sometimes, I think any Delorean will do. For months, there was a somewhat battered Delorean sitting at the Shell station at Connecticut and Fessenden. I wondered where it had traveled, what secrets of our future it held. And then there was my almost cousin, Marsha Katz z”l, Professor of Nuclear Physics at the University of Tennessee, who won a Delorean in a raffle. She kept it garaged in Knoxville, uncertain what to do with it. After her untimely death in an automobile accident 20 or so years ago, I don’t know what happened to the Delorean.

(Oh, you ask what an almost cousin is. Marsha was a first cousin to my first cousin. She and I were the same age, so I always knew her, even though we never spent much time together until she spent a year or so in DC on sabbatical working for a TN Senator. I think we both considered ourselves cousins….almost.)

In the meantime, I will try to keep track of the campaign against the “enemy within”, watch the inhumane treatment of anyone with a Spanish accent, follow the attempted regrowth of Hamas in Gaza, wonder how many Venezuelans we will kill in the Caribbean before we turn our military attacks on cartel members in Mexico, and look forward to the debate about putting Charlie Kirk’s portrait on the one dollar bill.

How will this all work out? As the inscrutable Chinese historian said in answer to the question: What was the effect of Napoleon on Western Europe? “It is much too soon to tell.”