Butterflies and Genocide

Lee Camp has started a substack page in the last couple months. He's only written a couple of things for it, but what he has done is really pretty good. The article that I'm thinking about right now is entitled 'Of Butterflies and Genocide'.

Illustration from Lee Camp's article: 'Of Butterflies and Genocide' on substack.

Lee and his toddler took in a monarch butterfly cocoon, 'a trinket hanging from a brown, fragile plant - A bright green pod hardly bigger than an adult’s thumbnail, crowned by brilliant gold dots reflecting the afternoon sun.' They basically rescued it from the cold and almost certain death it was facing. As Lee wrote:

Sure enough I found the odds of her surviving the metamorphosis in 45° F nights on a withering splintering milkweed leaf in the direct path of rambunctious dogs and feral neighborhood children were slim. (The nearly microscopic Monarch eggs have a 3% chance of enduring all the way to adult butterflies in the outside elements while they have a 90% chance when brought indoors and given the proper treatment.)

He did this while following, as many of us do, the horrors happening Gaza. He writes about the juxtaposition of caring for a butterfly while so many atrocities are happening, so many children dying, so much murder and starvation and despair. For NOTHING!

Lee writes about taking the newly blossomed monarch butterfly outside and letting it free, and he continues:

In hindsight I know why I invested so much time and thought into the growth and maturation toward freedom of a single minuscule creature. It’s tempting to say it was a metaphor for human evolution in a breathtakingly sick, ugly world. To say there’s something better coming. To say humanity sits moments away from breaking out of these stained, sullied dystopian circumstances and into a brand new gleaming reality of possibility and peace.

But that’s not it.

I sunk so much emotion into a bug (albeit an attractive one) as a distraction and a projection. As genocide drips down all our screens, a US-backed genocide at that, I desperately needed to help something live, to facilitate freedom and survival. I ached to show my child something beautiful while he’s still at the age before one comprehends the horrors of the evening news.

I completely agree with that. I've tried my whole life to be good to animals, to the environment, to other people and cultures and yet this genocidal, oligarchic, horrific crap goes on and on and there's nothing I can do about it, or so it seems.

I'd suggest reading Lee's article. It's short, but good. And, thanks for reading my synopsis of it. Here's the open thread - remember, everything is interesting if you dive deep enough, so tell us about where you're diving!