If we take for granted that the butterfly effect exists, how could we not expect that the drowning of migrants—allegedly by the coast guard, the very people there to protect them in the Mediterranean—would affect the increasingly violent incidents in Western metropolises?
If we accept that on a normal day, during a routine check, a baby can be shot to death with a bullet to its head, how can we be surprised by police brutality during simple protests?
Somehow, we have become so accustomed to the continuous (shocking) information feeds that we forget they are shaping us at the same time. That is our “training data,” so our predictions or expectations of the future cannot largely differ.
An alternate present could exist if we focus instead on building a new dataset—one from below, filled with histories of everyday resistance and kindness. By striving to be truly internationalist in our political thinking while actively participating in our local communities, we can hope that, being bigger than a butterfly, our effect will nevertheless have also a bigger impact.