Don't panic

On Poland's presidential quips, catastrophic flooding, and the results of rehabilitation and higher expectations

Poland and Czechia are experiencing catastrophic flooding -- enough to cause disruptions in Czech elections and leave billions of dollars in damages behind. It's an event so widespread and significant that it's engaged an EU-wide response.

■ Neighbors being neighborly, Germany has offered the assistance of some of its military units. Poland's president, Donald Tusk, announced the help with some deadpan commentary: "If you see German soldiers, please do not panic. They are here to help."

■ It's a funny line that speaks to a much more serious issue: We should never assume that the conditions that prevail today are going to continue in a straight line projection into the future. Germany, projected on a straight line out of 1939, would have been irredeemable. It needed to be stopped by a stronger power with greater moral bearings, and it was.

■ The evil within Germany had to be defeated -- crushed, even. The worst perpetrators deserved punishment as exactly the war criminals they chose to be.

■ But Germany as a concept? As a nation of people, representing a culture? As a historical continuity? It went wrong and it needed correction, including an occupation and reconstruction.

■ The world demanded that Germany become better, that it redeem itself and stay redeemed. Now, a human lifespan removed from Germany's deepest evils, the world remembers -- Donald Tusk's teasing proves that.

■ Yet the world also expected Germany to live up to a better standard, and after lots of work, we are all better off for it. It's a lesson worth applying to the conditions in any number of places around the world that look unsalvageable to us today. Straight line projections don't apply.