Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking they are a character in a history book. They have somewhere to be. There are children to feed, bills to pay and appointments to keep. A war appears on television while we make coffee. Another terrorist attack passes across our phones. Politicians argue about migration. The national debt climbs by another number too large to comprehend. Then we go to work.
We call these things “current events”, a phrase that makes them sound temporary. Something to discuss before returning to real life. But history is happening while we make plans for the weekend, and its consequences do not wait for us to pay attention.
We understand that feeling on a personal level. We look back at a family gathering, a childhood home or an afternoon with someone now gone and wish we had recognised its value at the time. The good old days rarely introduce themselves. Their significance becomes clear afterwards. The same can happen to a country. Familiar freedoms, everyday security and confidence in tomorrow can seem permanent until we discover how much they depended on decisions we barely noticed. You can still buy groceries, plan a holiday and watch football while the foundations of your world are shifting.
When Pressures Converge
In June 1914, an assassination in Sarajevo began a crisis that helped bring Europe into war. The assassination mattered because it occurred amid accumulated rivalries, military preparations and political commitments. The people living through that summer could not read ahead to discover what their leaders’ decisions would cost.
Today, several pressures are converging. Wars demand resources from heavily indebted governments. Conflict displaces populations. Poorly managed migration strains institutions and public consent. Terrorism intensifies demands for protection, while distrust gives ambitious leaders opportunities to seek greater power. These problems have different causes, but they can make one another harder to manage.
Russia’s war against Ukraine is shaping decisions about European security, American commitments and the conditions of a future peace. Its outcome will influence what governments believe force can accomplish and what smaller nations believe promises of support are worth. The conflict with Iran connects military decisions to shipping and global energy supplies, with consequences felt through fuel prices, transport costs and military deployments. A distant battlefield can change the choices available at your kitchen table.
Migration brings decisions about borders, integration, housing and public services whose effects extend across generations. Governments owe humane treatment to people seeking safety, but they also owe citizens honest answers about capacity, law and consent. Terrorist attacks test another part of that relationship: whether governments can protect people without sacrificing the freedoms they are meant to defend. Heavy debt makes these responsibilities harder to meet by limiting the resources available when emergencies arise.
I spent thirty years in the Army. Consequential decisions rarely waited for perfect clarity. We had to assess, question and act before knowing the outcome. Waiting carried consequences too. That experience makes me wary of the assumption that there will always be time to respond later, or that another election can reverse every consequence. Lost lives stay lost. Children carry the effects of war into adulthood. Financial obligations endure, and weakened institutions can take years to rebuild.
A Railway Station Becomes a Reckoning
Sometimes the event that exposes a system’s weakness happens at a railway station. On 1 November 2024, a canopy collapsed in Novi Sad, Serbia. Sixteen people ultimately died. The disaster sparked a student-led movement demanding accountability amid allegations of corruption and negligence. Almost two years later, on 25 October 2026, Aleksandar Vučić conceded his camp’s parliamentary election defeat to the student-led opposition.
Those people should have been able to wait for a train and continue their day. Their deaths gave accumulated grievances a common focus. Questions about construction became questions about accountability, public money, crime, corruption and whether those exercising power expected ever to answer for its consequences. People organised and sustained their demands. Others discovered they were no longer alone in asking them.
In my view, Serbia now has a chance for democracy finally to win in the fullest sense: citizens establishing that the state belongs to them. Making that victory endure requires the winners to accept the same scrutiny and accountability they demanded from their predecessors. Replacing those in power matters, but so does establishing rules that bind whoever comes next.
When Silence Looks Like Consent
Every dictator should study how such openings emerge. Power can deprive a ruler of truthful information. Officials conceal failures, loyalists deliver reassurance and frightened citizens conceal resentment. Silence begins to look like consent. Then something happens that official explanations cannot contain. A ruler sees an isolated incident; citizens recognise their shared experience of the system.
No government can know which failure will exhaust public patience. Preventing peaceful scrutiny may buy time while making the eventual reckoning harder to control. When people cannot obtain answers through ordinary institutions, each unanswered grievance adds to their reasons for distrusting those institutions. An event that officials expect to manage as a local failure can become a national demand for change.
What Keeping Our Freedoms Requires
For the ordinary person, the lesson is urgent too. We often imagine that we will receive an unmistakable warning before our world changes. Instead, we receive a succession of events we learn to live with. We become accustomed to explanations we would once have questioned, or excuse conduct from our preferred party that we would condemn in its opponents.
Citizens have responsibilities here. Demand evidence. Refuse to excuse corruption because it benefits your side. Defend the institutions that allow wrongdoing to be exposed and governments to be replaced peacefully. Appreciate what is good in your life now, and consider what keeping it requires. Everyday security depends in part on people doing the unglamorous work of asking questions, examining decisions and insisting on answers.
Our children will study this period knowing what followed. They may ask why we accepted certain things, ignored particular warnings or assumed someone else would act. We cannot know everything they will know, but we can take seriously the decisions in front of us.
And to the ruler certain his position is permanent: listen to the people your officials assure you are satisfied. You may be watching the borders, the opposition and the army.
History may be waiting at a railway station.
Kristijan Janković
Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel
