Caught in the Butterfly Effect
As I brush my teeth with the clear water that flows from my tap, my mind calls up the image of a little girl in Gaza, alone, who has no water to drink. Her parents are dead, buried under rubble by a bomb made in the USA. Then another image comes: a man sitting on rubble, the remnant of what used to be an apartment house in Ukraine, whose entire family was killed by a Russian bomb.
I order my mind to shift to the pink magnolia in bloom across the street. My dwelling on the horror helps nobody, it only keeps me awake at night. But another child appears, her story was in the New York Times with a photo--a surgeon leaning over her in a devastated hospital, about to amputate an arm without anesthesia.
We are connected, these people in the images, and I and you. Most of us have read of “the Butterfly Effect,” the notion that a tiny movement, such as the flutter of a butterfly, can lead to vast events that change the world. So it’s common sense that pain also ripples, in widening circles, far beyond the person afflicted.
Several days ago, twenty-five-year-old Aaron Bushnell, a cyberdefense operations specialist on active duty in the U.S. Air Force, immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington. The Washington Post reported that he had once lived in a religious community on Cape Cod. The reporter could not get through to the community’s leadership but spoke with a few people who had been part of it and had left. The first brief Washington Post story also mentioned that the airman had considered himself to be an anarchist. The underlying assumption in the story seemed to be that there was something wrong with this man who set himself afire, some psychiatric problem, most likely.
In Lithuania I saw a plaque in the plaza in Kaunas, at the spot where a young man named Romas Kalanta immolated himself at age 19 in protest against the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union. His self-sacrifice is honored. I did not meet anyone who dismissed it as the act of someone mentally ill, a nut case. But Lithuania is one of countries where what in the United States might be called depression is more likely to be called sorrow. I remember the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves during the Vietnam war.
Seeking relief, I go to a performance of Swan Lake by the excellent San Francisco Ballet. I write a letter to my Congress member, Nancy Pelosi. Please, we need a ceasefire in Gaza. She won’t support it, that’s pretty clear from her current position, but who’s to say what simple action is or isn’t futile? There’s the Butterfly Effect.
Spring will soon arrive. The old plum tree is abloom in our garden. I listen to Mahler’s Song of the Earth, an orchestral work filled with longing, farewells, and—still--a glimmer of hope.
Painting by Antonia Gustaitis