By: Ethan Goffman

Way back in 2008, I began a string of wrong predictions by boldly stating that Obama could not win because the American people just weren’t ready for a Black man to be president. I followed that with such zingers as: the 2008 housing crisis was just a market correction and won’t cause deep economic problems; both Star Wars and Marvel movies were essentially shallow and people were quickly losing interest; and in Afghanistan the Taliban were so exhausted by war and discredited by their backward attitudes that they would simply dwindle away.

After being so wrong at predicting the future so many times, I decided, instead, to predict the past. At a dinner party, for instance, I would proclaim: “I predict that World War II ended in 1945,” or “It is undoubtedly true that Trump surprised everyone and won the 2016 election with extremely narrow majorities in key states.” People pretty much ignored these statements as just more of my ravings—but it’s better to be ignored than flat-out wrong.

Eventually, even these predictions started to be wrong. At a board-game evening, I predicted that World War I ended in 1919; however, my friend Danny claimed it was 1918. But wasn’t 1918 the end of fighting and 1919 the official peace treaty? I tried to look it up, but Google just presented me with one of those interminably swirling icons. A bit later, I predicted that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot by an assassin in 1968, but my friends insisted that he had died in 1972 of a massive heart attack from the stress inflicted on him through leading the Civil Rights movement and the Poor People’s Campaign. That seemed plausible enough.

More recently, I predicted that Russia had invaded Ukraine but had been stopped at the gates of Kyiv, but my sister insisted that Ukraine had actually begun the conflict with raids across the border and Russia had, in revenge, occupied Kyiv. A bit later, I predicted that Biden’s policy of withholding money and arms from Israel had culminated in a breakthrough peace treaty, but my friends claimed that Biden had done no such thing, that following a brutal terrorist attack war had erupted in Gaza and was spreading.

Just last week, I predicted that Kamala Harris had won the contested 2024 election against Ron DeSantis by a vote in the House of Representatives, but that Texas and several other states had refused to accept the results and broken away from the United States. However, my wife insisted that Trump had won the election and was now president. “That’s silly,” I said. “Trump was impeached and convicted following the insurrection. He isn’t even eligible to become president and has been under house arrest for the last couple years.” My wife said I was taking my craziness too far.

So now there is civil war not only within the country but between my wife and me. I’d better give up the predictions game altogether. Indeed, I’d better give up reading history and following politics, which only causes trouble. Today is the first day of my total retreat from reality to the realm of art and music to live out my dwindling days.

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Ethan Goffman is author of the story collections The Church of the Oversoul (Uncollected Press, 2025), Realities and Alternatives (Cyberwit, 2023), and Dreamscapes (UnCollected Press, 2021), and the poetry collections I Garden Weeds (Cyberwit, 2021) and Words for Things Left Unsaid (Kelsay Books, 2020) . Ethan is co-founder and producer of Guerrilla Podcasts and is fiction editor for Setu Journal.