A rambling look at the tempting fantasy of deleting one event from history…

If history came with an undo button, I imagine we would all pretend to be responsible adults for about twelve seconds before elbowing each other out of the way. One person would try to erase a war. Another would erase a heartbreak. Someone, somewhere, would use the full power of cosmic revision to prevent themselves from sending a reply-all email in 2017.

The question is simple enough to sound like a party game: if you could erase one event from history, what would it be? But the longer you sit with it, the less it feels like entertainment and the more it feels like confession. What we want to erase reveals what we still carry. It points to the wound we believe should never have happened, the mistake we think bent everything out of shape, the moment we imagine standing between us and a better world.

Erasing one event is appealing because it promises a cleaner story. No scar. No awkward chapter. No long explanation that begins with, “Well, what had happened was…” There is comfort in believing that one removal could restore order, make the world a better place, make life be a fairy tale that ends with happily ever after.

And maybe, in some cases, it would be good. If the erased event spared suffering, prevented cruelty, or stopped a harm that rippled through generations, who would not be tempted to reach for the eraser? There are moments in human history so brutal that imagining their absence feels less like fantasy and more like mercy. We are not wrong to wish certain pain had never been born.

For me, for me today… That event would be the rise of Trump and the win in 2016, but even that event happened before it did. I would erase the last 10 years. But then the four years of Biden, 2020- 2024, were, as I see it, a slight relief for me. A dose of hope punctuating the wasteland of cultism and racism, hate, and vileness of mankind. The years leading to that event were the real thing I would like to erase. The brainwashing, the evil that shook off the dirt and crawled up from where it was thought buried. It is too big to change, too embedded in the minds and dark souls of mankind to be vanquished by a “wish.”

The problem is that history is not a tidy row of dominoes. No, it is a bowl of spaghetti where you tug one strand and the whole thing shifts. The event we erase might also erase the courage that rose against it, the warnings it left behind, the movements it inspired, the people who became who they are because they survived what should have broken them.

That does not mean suffering is secretly good. Pain does not need a public relations team. Some things are simply terrible, and calling them “necessary” can be a lazy way to avoid grief. But it does mean that erasure is not the same as healing. To erase an event is to remove both the injury and the evidence. It may save us from remembering, but it may also rob us of understanding.

Still, I understand the desire. Wanting to erase one event can be an act of compassion. It says, “This should not have happened.” It says, “No lesson was worth that cost.” It says, “If love had a time machine, it would at least try.” There is something deeply human in refusing to make peace with needless harm.

In that sense, the fantasy of erasing history is useful even if the power is impossible. It forces us to name what we value. If you would erase a war, perhaps you believe peace is not sentimental but urgent. If you would erase an act of betrayal, perhaps loyalty matters more to you than you admit. If you would erase a personal mistake, perhaps you are still learning that regret is not proof you are ruined, but rather it is proof you are paying attention.

Maybe the better question is not what we would erase, but what we would refuse to repeat. We cannot edit history with the elegance of a backspace key. The past is stubborn. It keeps receipts. But memory gives us a different kind of tool, not deletion, but direction.

So yes, erasing one event from history might be good if it spared the innocent, softened the brutal, or prevented grief from becoming inheritance. But since we do not get that choice, we are left with the harder work… remembering honestly, repairing what we can, and building a future that does not require our descendants to fantasize about erasing us.