Thursday's Columns
March 3, 2026
Our Ace Reporter's Last March Last Fall
In The Leadup To World War Three
Our
Story
by
Lawrence Abby Gauthier
ace reporter
The Westphalia Periodic News
People make fun of me for bringing Leibniz into everything. Leibniz said we live in the best of all possible worlds. They laughed at him too. Voltaire famously made him out to be a fool in Candide.
But Leibniz is who comes to me when I’m faced with an existential question.
It was the first day of World War Three, the last day of February, 2026. A Saturday morning. In a few weeks I’d be turning 78 years old. But I’d slept good the night before and was feeling like a younger me. I dreamt I was a kid again, coming down the ski jump the neighborhood gang had built on Millie Hill, getting ready to fly.
Culley Jane had coffee ready. She’s the one who told me that while we slept, the world had quietly slipped into what historians would one day call World War Three.
I knew that for as long as I lived it would be one of those days I’d never forget, like where I was and what I was doing and did the day the President was killed, or his brother, or Martin Luther King. I watched Neil Armstrong step out onto the surface of the moon on the television in the student lobby of Spooner Hall at Northern Michigan University. On 9/11, I was an over-the-road trucker picking up a load of Belgian beer at a port on the Atlantic coast and then got back over the Appalachians as fast as I could. Where I was the day the kids were born. The death of a family pet.
I took my mug of coffee out back to the patio.
The sun was warm — snow-capped mountains reflected its bright white light.
The sun is a plasma furnace.
Our backyard apricot tree was waking from its long winter’s sleep.
I could hear children playing in the neighborhood park.
I tried to imagine the best of all possible worlds — children were playing in the neighborhood park. An apricot tree comes back to life.
It was possible!
It was right there in front of my eyes. As real as real can be.
Leibniz also said that whatever is possible demands! to exist.
--30--
The
Philosophy
Couch
Dr. Jerry Gilbert
Clinical Psychologist
(Retired)
Dr. Jerry
To the Ace Reporter:
I liked your column last week where you identify as a “negentropist.” It was interesting and informative. But I need clarification.
I wasn’t familiar with the term “negentropist.” I found two meanings on the internet: 1) Distance from the normal, and 2) Someone who is opposed to entropy and focuses on order. I assume you meant the latter definition.
I’m not sure what physicists would say about the concept, but I think it’s being used here in a historical sense — that history eventually moves in positive and progressive ways. However, you used that identity to say you agreed with someone’s position that we have to let history (like Nature) take its course. That sounds too passive, as if we can be confident that perhaps in a hundred or a thousand years or so there will be fewer pedophiles, Satanists, and world conquerors. Gandhi said not to lose hope because eventually all tyrants fall.
Yes, Egyptian Pharaohs, Genghis Kahn, Roman dominance, Hitler, and other world conquerors eventually died and their empires fell. (Perhaps American History will one day put Trump in that group). You can look at that optimistically, or you can see it as no matter how many despots fall, they are replaced by other despots. This pattern can be seen as cyclical, and is fundamentally a product of Human Nature. But whatever you want to call me, I think a major factor in the descent of atrocities people are capable of, it requires action—mostly from the bottom up, initiated by victims—to bring about change. Of course, there are many other factors: it helps when empires implode by a series of incompetent leaders, the death of a monarch, disease, defeat in wars, and other things.
But if we want to put an end to, or at least reduce to minimal levels, the “bad” side of Human Nature, it requires the combined efforts of several factions in our society. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. People do. Consider how quickly a treatment for COVID occurred when it was made a priority. It was a threat big enough to mobilize the necessary ingredients to bring it under control. Consider an equal combination of ingredients to prioritize ending or substantially reducing pedophilia.
What we learn from history depends on where we look and which patterns we embrace.
Regards,
Jerry
