Lessons from a Monarch (Butterfly)

I watch a monarch butterfly float over our deck in the sunshine; it flutters and weaves, circles a purple flower and lights for a moment before taking flight again.

The light is lovely this afternoon, here on the Platinum coast of California, the American Riviera. The morning marine layer burned off early and now it’s a postcard day, a day tailor-made for tourists. I wonder where the tourists get the money to travel, which leads me to wonder how residents of this glorious city make the nut every month. What do they do or own that pulls in the big sums needed? Unemployment is high in California – higher than the official numbers suggest – but here the beat goes on as if the economy is humming.

If well off residents of the American Riviera have taken a hit, they manage to disguise the fact with relative ease.

It’s less easy for the working poor, but then everything is less easy for the poor.

When the monarch returns for another pass at the flowers, I ponder my fate if my job were to suddenly disappear. I have no illusions that it can’t happen to me because it can; no job is safe today. In less than a minute I have created – in my head -- a doomsday scenario full of desperation and degradation. In a blink my family and I are on the street, another charity case, another casualty, another statistical entry in a government database. Homeless. Destitute. Doomed.

It’s not class warfare when the wealthy and well-connected rig the political system to rob working people and the poor – it’s only class warfare when workers and the poor push back, speak up, make demands; then the rich mobilize talking heads and pliable journalists and the airwaves fill with slogans: “We can’t create jobs by taxing the producers.” “Tax cuts are the answer. Slash tax rates and jobs will appear, like mushrooms.” The truth makes no difference – it’s the slogan that matters, the crisp sound bite, easily and often repeated.

The news I read argues that more and more middle-class folks are losing their grip on the ladder and falling into the abyss where the American Dream becomes a nightmare. These are the stories that never make Good Morning America or the CBS Evening News – stories about a generation destined to fare worse than the one before.

All this from watching a butterfly? All this from pondering how people make the monthly nut? Shouldn’t I be thinking of something else on this sun-splashed day? Why can’t I understand that tax cuts for the rich mean jobs for the poor? It’s so simple. Wealth equates to virtue. The eye of the needle is a hindrance no more.

In flight the monarch appears to be playing, like a child on a playground, floating one way for a while, then abruptly altering course as the mood strikes. Happy butterfly. The reality, of course, is that the butterfly isn’t here for leisure or fun: it’s programmed to lay its eggs and die. Every egg doesn’t produce a caterpillar, and every caterpillar doesn’t become a butterfly. The monarch fights for life and continuance like every other species.

The monarch dwells here and now, and maybe that is all I can learn from watching it dance across my deck.