Quote from Jeanette on Nov 9th, 2018, 2:47pm:You are making the argument that your wife's murder is a fixed event and cannot be changed unless you had attended a different high school. So be it.
You then, however, make an argument that the plane crash is a random event and that a five-minute phone call would have changed everything despite me stating that a series of events resulted in the plane crash. Granted, I did not list any of those events.
For the sake of discussion let us suppose that it is possible to change one of those events. Dad flew on Saturday the sixteenth, four days after May 12. May 12 was the tenth anniversary of
May 12, 1982, the day Braniff International filed for bankruptcy. Dad knew people who had worked for that airline. That is why he was out that day.
If Braniff did not shut down, or shut down on a different day, Dad might not have flown that Saturday.
Jeanette Isabelle
There are fixed events and there are random events. Weather, earthquakes, solar flairs, almost anything non-living natural thing is fixed in time as an event. Human, Flora and/or Fauna caused events is not. The problem occurs when living/dead creatures interconnect with non-living things and it becomes something of both - an interconnected event.
Your statement of event A (Braniff Airlines going out of business) being connected with your father's action of the day of the plane crash (Event B), if Event A did not happen, Event B would not happened. That is correct. The only problem is if "He has to die on that day," then it will happen through another event. Only Historical icons like JFK would be such an example, if JFK did not die, it would have irreversibly changed history.
The issue with my wife is as it stands. from '73 to '77 I was bullied by a lot of black bully kids because of the Civil Rights Movement, blacks, especially the you ones believed themselves to be "Owed" something for their suffering. But yet they put down the works of Rosa Parks, MLK and Malcolm X. Many believed that they should have started Civil War and fragment the nation. Yet I as a Puerto Rican was going through some royal shit for being Puerto Rican. Blacks thought that Puerto Ricans were GIVEN everything they have, when we had to work hard to get what we got and that was little. So at the time Black Gangs went after Puerto Rican kids. That is why I wanted to go to Brooklyn Tech, where my Academic Skills would be challenged and I go further in life.
Once in Tech, I met up with this albino black girl and at first thought nothing of it. But because of my handicap from Julia Richman HS (blind temporarily blind), she was assigned to me to tutor and help me with my homework. I did not know that she was beginning to have feeling for me because like her, I had life adversities that I was working hard to overcome. But she displayed this air of denial that in my condition I could not see. Then came this asshole who claimed to be her boyfriend when he was not, and he was bullying everyone to scare them away from Cathy. Thing is, he met me, and I would not be bullied and I would not be scared. I fought him at every chance I had too and won. In short, "mom did not raise any sissies."
But like the Black Gangs in my neighborhood, he was part of the controlling head of the Black Mafia (who controlled the cocaine and marijuana flow into New York City from South East Asia). Thus he had a lot of power or so he thought. Because of my friends and the work I did as a teen lifeguard in rescuing lives, I got connections with the Chinese Mafia, The Japanese Yacusa, and the Italian Mafia. There we nowhere in the city where somebody had their eyes on me to protect me. But Randal tried again, and again, and again. And again, and again and again, he failed.
Given time I would garner emotions for Cathy as she had of me. But I too kept it in a veil of denial because I did not want to go through what I went through with Mary. Because of that, our emotions betrayed us and we started to pick on each other. Some would say like siblings, others would say like peeved lovers. We did not realized it ourselves until we sat down and had a serious talk. But in that talk, she told me that she was getting married to Randal to pay off a family debt. And they say that Slavery was over in 1864... it was doing great in BTHS in 1979! Though I tried to end our relationship, Randal was abusing Cathy and she was arriving to school with bruises and in pain. I challenged him several times about stopping it. He laughed, so the next time Cathy came in bruised up, I hunted his ass down and beat the shit out of him. If he was with his brothers, I took care of them first before beating the crap out of him. Any abuse he gave Cathy, I returned it to him double. After a while he grew a brain cell and figured out that is he stopped abusing Cathy, that I would stop beating his ass. That bought her a year and half of peace.
Cathy and I grew as a couple knowing that it would be a sudden end to come. Certain of her friends supported us because I was the only one that stood up for her when no one else would. But that end came. I was given one chance to end the wedding, and I choose not to act, she married that asshole (July '81). Then he abandoned her and she divorced him in absentia for abandonment - he went to the Air Force as an OSI operative and sent no money to her to support her and their child, he had to go to welfare to support herself. We would meet again in '83 when she was trying to apply for college courses and become a student.
Long story short, we were married in less than 6 weeks. We thought we had peace. But Randal would return from his mission in Japan to confront Cathy of her actions to divorce him. He had his family chase her around and harass her (like he did before but now it was worse). She had an order of protection on her and this carried a licensed and registered .38 snub nose revolver on her at all times, and she pulled out in public to keep those idiots at bay. When confronted by the police, she would pull out her gun license, registration and order of protection. Of course - they were arrested for harassing her. With much of his family in jail, Randal came to New York to confront her himself. We argued about it until she bluntly said, "If you do not trust me, then maybe we should not be married. So I let her go to have her date with Randal.
He would kill her that night. And the Blizzard of '83 fell on the city - 3 days of non-stop snow. She would be buried in the snow, and not found for almost a month. The rest is history.
Now, the only key point in this, if I never went to Tech, we would have never met, she would not fallen in love with and and I in love with her. No other point would have stopped this, not even me ending her first wedding to him. It is a paradox that I ran again and again in my mind and in my dreams and that is the only answer I could find. Any other time, because we connected from the first day of school, even if I transferred out of classes we shared, she would still come to me no matter what. If that first day never happened, if I never went to Tech, she would not have been killed years later. Period.