COLUMN: Flap your butterfly wings
If major league and college sports can take five days off, I guess alleged humor columnists like me can pause. It is the least we can do from a group of people who always do the least they can do. You’ve probably noticed a pretty heavy dose of cynicism in this space if you are even a casual reader. Living by the motto that “the secret to happiness is low expectations,” I probably expressed less shock than most. Writers are no gurus or shamans and in real life not all that interesting as people. We are misfits fixated on details. You had to get a bunch of writers and editors together to publish a document as big as the Bible. The first draft stopped at “love thy brother as thyself.”
This column and most broadcasts could be cut short if we were honest enough to say “I don’t have a clue as to why this all happened.” But we don’t and the national chatter goes on because we need the catharsis. There have already been mountains of words said about the events of last week, and I think it is important to just call them “the events of last week” rather than going with whatever buzzword and logo the major TV media are throwing out. The events affected people in many different ways and it is unfair to slap a label on it, package it and promote it like a new mini-series.
Humor columnists and most others are feeling rather superfluous, or as the English like to refer to unemployment, “redundant.” I don’t think it is just me, but most of what we do with our days seems pretty trivial right now. I can’t give anybody CPR or fight a fire; I’m too old to join the armed forces and I don’t think anyone should rely on my home improvement skills to rebuild anything. So, like most of us, I’m stuck here putting on a good front and finding my occupation just a micron shy of meaningless.
I hope that once the anger subsides, we can splash a little cold water on our egos and look in the mirror. We are all complicit in the flapping butterfly wings of hate. There is a popular theory that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can cause changes that compound and contribute to the weather in North America. Likewise, in small ways we can all contribute to world peace and world hate in the most minute things we do daily.
I’m not pointing any fingers that I don’t point at myself. I can’t even play soccer in an old, fat guys league without getting kicked out of the game for some inane loss of temper. I also punched a car last year. Of course I punched it in a dumb attempt to get back at a guy who nearly ran me over in the cross walk so he could save 10 seconds in his commute. Our self-centered drivenness that makes for robust capitalism does not foster caring or peace.
I spent a peaceful week (yeah, that peace, love and weirdness thing called Burning Man that I was originally going to write about) in the desert and listened to the book-on-tape Pay it Forward on the way home and experienced several hundred miles of giddy optimism as I drove through the sagebrush. Then this happened.
Yep, we can join forces when major disasters come along but on a day-to-day basis we can barely coexist. Really, if you just look around you’ll see it everywhere – from the locks we have to put on everything to speeding on the highway because “everybody else is;” to a bunch of empty beer bottles that someone left on the beach. Sure, it sounds ridiculous when you go from step one to step 1,000, but cutting someone off in traffic or being rude to a fast-food worker does contribute to world unrest. You just don’t see it because you are not looking for the details.
Face it, you’re probably not going to get that chance to save a baby from a burning building, so why not do what you can? Pick up a piece of trash that you didn’t drop or open a door for someone of your own gender. Your butterfly wings just might lead to something good. Peace is not a government program or a marketing slogan. It isn’t something you can elect someone to do. It is something you have to do in whatever small or silly way you can. Do I think we can do it? No, but like most cynics, secretly I’d love to be proven wrong.