Inconceivable!

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

Fans of the 1987 film “The Princess Bride” will no doubt recall the villainous character Vizzini, played by the great Wallace Shawn, exclaiming that many things were “Inconceivable” — even though they were clearly happening right in front of him — to his lackeys Inigo Montoya and Fezzik. With his signature lisp and his unfounded arrogance, the character’s famous quote is used all the time, here more than three decades later, maybe even by people who don’t know where it comes from.

And like Vizzini, I am now finding things inconceivable, even though they are, in fact, clearly happening right in front of me.

Over the past five years alone, there have been a lot of things happening that truly seem inconceivable.

First and foremost, I never thought the COVID-19 pandemic would become a real problem. I was reminded of this recently

See VIEWPOINT, page A5 VIEWPOINT

From page A4

when I went looking back in the online archives for something and ran across a piece that I wrote right here in the “Viewpoint” section titled, “No, you’re not going to die,” where I basically dismissed the whole coronavirus hysteria as no big deal — about three weeks before the whole world shut down and millions of people did indeed die.

Another one… If you had told me even 10 years ago that a presidential election would have been so divisive that insurgents would storm the Capitol Building or that we’d have a president get impeached twice, I’d have thought you were nuts. And then the man behind all of that chaos would get overwhelmingly re-elected? Inconceivable!

So many things that I would have labeled as “inconceivable” have happened over the past few years, I’m no longer even surprised now. Truly nothing is “inconceivable” anymore. Have you seen the things that are being done with A.I. these days? We are getting very close to completely blurring the line between reality and virtual reality. It’s pretty nuts.

Have you seen photos from the recent Mars landing? You can actually see high-definition photos of the surface of Mars! They say one day, and not too far into the future, we’ll send actual people to explore Mars. Incon… No…

You know what? Cool.