While a comparison with the Cuban Crisis does little to reassure us, it can offer some lessons on how our government avoided disaster in an even worse situation. We have been closer to the brink and still found a way to walk back.
What we see and how we see it largely depends on where we are standing. A shared sense of history, of what was, or might’ve been, or could be again, is the indispensable touchstone of our collective judgement, for memory is the soul of conscience.