Unprepared for What Has Already Happened

The ice had melted in my glass by the time I finished reading. Cheap bourbon, watered down now, like everything else these days.

Some NPR guy — Ira Glass, the “This American Life” host — built a whole episode around a phrase that hit me like a kidney punch: “Unprepared for what has already happened.”

Read that again. Not unprepared for what’s coming. Unprepared for what’s already happened.

That’s the cruelest part. The future everyone warned us about showed up while we were still arguing whether it was real. The robots aren’t coming. They’re here. They’ve been here. And most of us are still standing at the station waiting for a train that left three years ago.