Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the difference between unpredictable calamities and the predictable crisis of an aging population's entitlement system.
George Will contrasts sudden disasters that strike without warning, like the stock market crash and 9/11, with the ongoing and expected crisis posed by an aging population's dependents on social programs. He suggests that while some events are unforeseen and disastrous, the issues arising from demographics are known and require awareness and action.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the implications of aging populations on social security programs.
The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet - a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum.
The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.
Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial.
Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.
The civil forfeiture law - if something so devoid of due process can be dignified as law - is an incentive for perverse behavior: Predatory government agencies get to pocket the proceeds from property they seize from Americans without even charging them with, let alone convicting them of, crimes. Criminals are treated better than this because they lose the fruits of their criminality only after being convicted.
Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?
The laws of chess do not permit a free choice: you have to move whether you like it or not.
By whomsoever no evil is done in deed, or word, or thought, him I call a Brahmin (holy man) who is guarded in these three.
Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-
How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?
If a man devotes himself to the instructions of his own unconscious, it can bestow this gift [of renewal], so that suddenly life, which has been stale and dull, turns into a rich unending inner adventure, full of creative possibilities
Isn't it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?
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