Butterfly Effect
The other night when Katie and I came back from the cemetery (http://shortnsweet421.livejournal.com/78406.html), the movie "The Butterfly Effect" was on. I'm honestly not a huge Ashton (What the hell kind of name is Ashton, anyway?) Kutcher fan, but the premise had interested me, and Mary had seen it and recommended it. For the past few weeks, I'd been thinking about what life would have been like if my sister Maggie had lived. From everything I understand, all three of us were pretty close calls. Katie was born two months too early and without all of her organs developed yet. (I still contend all of our family members lit a few too many candles for Katie's lungs :) I had stopped breathing and moving, and so I was born about a month early. I don't know when Maggie's expected birthdate was, but her birth and death were also obviously complicated.
For a lot of years, I struggled with the weird feeling that there was some strange equation out in the universe that had resulted in my survival but had taken Maggie from us prematurely. I imagine it's similar to the kind of guilt some war veterans feel when they've seen their buddies go down and they somehow managed to survive. This feeling has never really been very productive, because it has often made me feel like I'm wasting my life and that Maggie would have done a hell of a lot better if she had made it and I had passed.
My interest in science fiction had made me think (perhaps too frequently) about somehow going back in time to try to change things, and seeing this movie renewed some of those thoughts. I'd long thought about going back to warn Mom and Dad to get Mom to the hospital earlier, or going back to change any number of things which I suspected were the initial seeds of my depression and some of our family's turbulence. There are almost unlimited historical wrongs that one could right, but at what point would the meddling do more harm than good?
On the one hand, the notion of going back in one's own life to fix things has a certain degree of selfishness attached, even if your motives are to alleviate someone else's suffering too. For instance, if you could go back to any point in history, why not try to stop the Holocaust, or save Jesus from the Crucifixion, or write "THOU Shalt NOT be an Asshole" or "Thou shalt have no other gods beside me, but thou also shall not hate another on account of his or her worship of another god" into the Ten Commandments? Are immediacy and proximity the only guides by which you could reasonably decide if you had the choice? Saving my cousin or my sister, or my uncle, etc. seems to be a no-brainer because the immediate consequences would almost have to be positive, but what about events longer ago or of seemingly greater historical significance? What about the effect on events in the future of which I would have no knowledge?
For instance, killing Hitler in the 1920's would seem to have few historic drawbacks. But what if that merely paved the way for a slightly less insane version of Hitler and the Nazis? Hitler's insanity was one of the reasons we were able to beat the Germans in World War II. We threw easily ten tanks in the way of every one of their tanks, and it was merely because our manufacturing infrastructure hadn't been destroyed that we were able to do so. Additionally, Hitler did really stupid stuff, like stop train loads of supplies from going to the German front so that the trains could carry more people to the concentration camps. If the Nazis had a slightly more sane leader at the helm, the possibility exists that the Allies might have lost.
Most of this rant is immaterial because I CAN'T time travel, but I've often thought about these moral dilemnas in relation to my life. Perhaps it is because I've always cared more for the hypothetical than the actual, but I've thought a lot about the "Butterfly Effect" certain painful events have had in my life and the lives of my family and friends. I suppose it would be much more productive to move on from the past and work on changing the future, but I feel just as powerless when thinking of the future. In the end, if I could change the past for the better, and be assured that I won't end up as Ashton Kutcher, I would probably change the past. In the mean time, I've got to focus on the present, and making sure I don't miss actual opportunities in favor of hypothetical ones.
P.S. I apologize that this post makes no sense. I'm quite tired and have been pretty distracted today.
For a lot of years, I struggled with the weird feeling that there was some strange equation out in the universe that had resulted in my survival but had taken Maggie from us prematurely. I imagine it's similar to the kind of guilt some war veterans feel when they've seen their buddies go down and they somehow managed to survive. This feeling has never really been very productive, because it has often made me feel like I'm wasting my life and that Maggie would have done a hell of a lot better if she had made it and I had passed.
My interest in science fiction had made me think (perhaps too frequently) about somehow going back in time to try to change things, and seeing this movie renewed some of those thoughts. I'd long thought about going back to warn Mom and Dad to get Mom to the hospital earlier, or going back to change any number of things which I suspected were the initial seeds of my depression and some of our family's turbulence. There are almost unlimited historical wrongs that one could right, but at what point would the meddling do more harm than good?
On the one hand, the notion of going back in one's own life to fix things has a certain degree of selfishness attached, even if your motives are to alleviate someone else's suffering too. For instance, if you could go back to any point in history, why not try to stop the Holocaust, or save Jesus from the Crucifixion, or write "THOU Shalt NOT be an Asshole" or "Thou shalt have no other gods beside me, but thou also shall not hate another on account of his or her worship of another god" into the Ten Commandments? Are immediacy and proximity the only guides by which you could reasonably decide if you had the choice? Saving my cousin or my sister, or my uncle, etc. seems to be a no-brainer because the immediate consequences would almost have to be positive, but what about events longer ago or of seemingly greater historical significance? What about the effect on events in the future of which I would have no knowledge?
For instance, killing Hitler in the 1920's would seem to have few historic drawbacks. But what if that merely paved the way for a slightly less insane version of Hitler and the Nazis? Hitler's insanity was one of the reasons we were able to beat the Germans in World War II. We threw easily ten tanks in the way of every one of their tanks, and it was merely because our manufacturing infrastructure hadn't been destroyed that we were able to do so. Additionally, Hitler did really stupid stuff, like stop train loads of supplies from going to the German front so that the trains could carry more people to the concentration camps. If the Nazis had a slightly more sane leader at the helm, the possibility exists that the Allies might have lost.
Most of this rant is immaterial because I CAN'T time travel, but I've often thought about these moral dilemnas in relation to my life. Perhaps it is because I've always cared more for the hypothetical than the actual, but I've thought a lot about the "Butterfly Effect" certain painful events have had in my life and the lives of my family and friends. I suppose it would be much more productive to move on from the past and work on changing the future, but I feel just as powerless when thinking of the future. In the end, if I could change the past for the better, and be assured that I won't end up as Ashton Kutcher, I would probably change the past. In the mean time, I've got to focus on the present, and making sure I don't miss actual opportunities in favor of hypothetical ones.
P.S. I apologize that this post makes no sense. I'm quite tired and have been pretty distracted today.