The Lasting Lesson.
One of the longest lasting lessons from my six years of University was taught on the first day.
We First Years assembled in one of the larger lecture theatres and waited for the lecturer.
My eyes wandered around the hushed space to the graffito scrawled diagonally across one of the large cork pin up boards on the wall at the front of the room in thick marker pen:
China in Vietnam. The beginning of the end …
The one month Sino-Vietnamese War was four years earlier.
The world had not ended. It still has not.
I’ve forgotten 99% of what I read and heard at University.
But the memory of that false prediction by some anonymous anxious undergraduate remains. I think of it each time some pundit predicts doom.