Ohel Moshe Virtual Shmoozing

Rather than looking back, I've decided it's time to look forward.  I think I've just read too much about how Covid-19 was not just predictable but actually predicted by assorted futurists. We should have a national contest or registry to contain our best thoughts on what the next "unexpectable" crisis will be.  The guideline is that it can't be anything that has happened before, because that would make it predictable.  So that rules out catastrophes like:

1. General overvaluation of stocks as in The Great Depression.
2. World wars.
3. Revolutions like the Hungarian.
4. Power plays in oil supply as in circa 1975.
5. Nuclear energy mistakes like Chernobyl or TMI (that's Three Mile Island not Too Much Information).
6. Dot.com bubbles.
7. Terrorism as in 9-11.
8. Impact of having no financial competency standards in house and car lending, thereby endangering the whole banking system.
9. ...and of course plagues like Ebola, SARS, and the current Covid-19.
10. As a sub-set of the item above, I'd include biological warfare in this list, just in case it's true that China developed the virus in a laboratory rather than there having been something going on among shrimp or bats, and people in Wuhan.  I've been telling people since I was a very little boy that the USA would eventually pay for not having helped Formosa keep Red China from getting into power (does anyone remember My Weekly Reader?).

So after not that much thought - probably because I'm no longer capable of that much thought - I think we've got a choice of at least two items for the next socio-economic and/or public health crisis:

1. An alien visitation, and they want a bail-out from Congress.
2. The arrival of Moshiach which would deprive America of its Jewish contributors, because our people will all be in Yerushalayim,and they'll be occupied finding ways to adapt the miraculous solution for the "no room (and actually no reason) for social distancing" challenge in the Bais Ha'Mikdosh to the general housing situation in the city.

While I wonder what other potential shocks there may be to living as we were accustomed to in the pre-Mageifah era, I'm sort of hoping that second item immediately above will be the challenge Bimharo V'Yomainu.  Truly, I'm not concerned about household products shortages in the Messianic era.