By Lee Camp
An orange butterfly taking flight for the first time, unaware of the tempestuous unforgiving yet dazzling world it brightens. The dusty bodies of executed children. These are the two defining images of my weekend. And most painful is their lack of exceptionality.
Ten days ago my toddler found and pointed out what looked to be 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. How stunning and out-of-place it appeared. It took me a moment to figure out what it was—I had never seen a monarch butterfly cocoon before.
It feels like it doesn’t belong, an ill fitting accessory for the brown shriveling leaves of autumn. It looks more like something an Egyptian pharaoh would be entombed with, right at home alongside ornate ivory hair brushes and flashy golden necklaces.
Later that day, in between reading about the latest unfathomable atrocities Israel committed, I read up on monarch butterflies and the best temperatures for them to survive the no doubt difficult transformation from caterpillar to majestic kaleidoscopic aerial dream bug. 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.)
So I took a brief pause from ingesting yet another article about a small child targeted for death by a Zik (Hermes 450) armed attack drone, nearly silent as it rains death from above. I went outside armed with a pair of scissors and some dental floss—The scissors to cut the leaf and the dental floss to tie around the top of the chrysalis (the cocoon) in order to suspend it from the inside of a small plastic container.
Over the next week the cherry tomato-sized bauble turned a gripping rich blue like a raging sea of torment and fury. In that time several hundred innocent people were murdered by Israel—In Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank.
Occasionally my child, desperately curious about everything both natural and not, would take a look at the dangling chrysalis. Of course since it wasn’t moving, it held his attention 1/100th of the time a matchbox car might. Meanwhile I would peer at it and lose myself in the seething subaquatic abyss, a richness of color that called to mind a collapsing galaxy pulsating with the hopes and desires, anguish and love, pain and passion of legions. Or maybe an expanding galaxy, blossoming into such abundance. …It gripped me.
Israel holds roughly 10,000 Palestinian hostages in its prisons.
On Saturday, after one week in our home, a vibrant orange and black butterfly materialized. I imagine no matter how many times one might see this, it probably always seems magical, otherworldly. How a butterfly fit, metamorphosed, and retailored itself inside that pod I will never understand.
As Israeli officials brainstormed new and interesting ways to stop food from reaching starving children, my small family of three walked outside to release a new butterfly into the world. I trepidatiously lowered my index finger into the container in front of the tiny flier (lepidoptera) as I saw on a YouTube video, and she crawled slowly onto it as if she knew the plan exactly.
I then delicately, ever so carefully, held her next to a small violet flower and she snuck onto it, minding the gap. I had read that monarchs will sit still for several hours after greeting the world in order to dry out their wings (and probably take things in, recalibrating to their new reality). She did exactly that before eventually fluttering away, going about her effervescent orange journey.
Israel fired white phosphorus at UN workers in Lebanon.
The IDF set another hospital in Gaza ablaze.
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.
Projection won’t save the world. Momentary distraction won’t stop one Israeli bomb from falling or secure one sandwich for a single Gazan child.
But perhaps, just maybe, I’m raising a child with empathy and love for all living things. Maybe he’ll be one more person who accepts no justification for ethnic cleansing and war crimes.
I don’t yet know how to process the moral injury of the true unfettered massacre we’re all absorbing. I don’t know if anyone does. …But there’s one more butterfly in the world.
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