Usually, the events that trigger arguments between friends, lovers, and even nations aren’t all that significant in and of themselves. They matter only because they represent or symbolize some larger and more serious issue. Who among us hasn’t, at one point or another, made some small, stupid, and innocuous mistake that has been taken by a loved one as evidence of a deeper character flaw? The argument that begins with a husband forgetting his anniversary isn’t actually about the day itself. It’s about the state of the marriage and about his spousal neglect.
The same is true on the historical plane. Many people have been murdered on the streets of Sarajevo over the centuries without global conflagrations ensuing as a result. But when Gavrilo Princip shot the Austrian archduke on a summer’s day in that city over a hundred years ago, all hell broke loose. The deluge that engulfed the world during the subsequent decades had little to do with the fact that one man had peppered the flesh of another with hot lead near Schiller’s delicatessen, just off of the Appel Quay. The perpetrator and the victim had both to be living symbols of nationhood for the governments of the earth to put their manhood on the march in response to a single murder in a distant land.
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