Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the difference between unpredictable calamities and the predictable crisis of an aging population's entitlement system.
George Will contrasts sudden disasters that strike without warning, like the stock market crash and 9/11, with the ongoing and expected crisis posed by an aging population's dependents on social programs. He suggests that while some events are unforeseen and disastrous, the issues arising from demographics are known and require awareness and action.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the implications of aging populations on social security programs.
The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet - a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum.
The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.
Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.
Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.
The civil forfeiture law - if something so devoid of due process can be dignified as law - is an incentive for perverse behavior: Predatory government agencies get to pocket the proceeds from property they seize from Americans without even charging them with, let alone convicting them of, crimes. Criminals are treated better than this because they lose the fruits of their criminality only after being convicted.
Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?
Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
The cause and root of nearly all evils in the sciences is this-that while we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind we neglect to seek for its true helps.
There is no such thing as Freedom (though it is the most important condition of human life, after Humility, -which does not exist either). There is only Slavery (walls around one) and absence-of-Slavery (ability to walk in any direction, or to remain still).
Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.
We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.
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