“It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world”. The quote appears on the screen at the opening of the movie The Butterfly Effect. The premise of the movie is that everything that happens in this moment is an accumulation of everything that’s happened before it. This idea is not new and is rooted in Chaos Theory, a mathematical theory which states that small differences in initial conditions can yield widely diverging outcomes. It shows that what was once thought to be the randomness of a complex system is actually a system of interconnections, patterns and feedback loops. Chaos Theory suggests that all of our actions, no matter how seemingly small, have consequences.
As someone who overthinks everything, Chaos Theory is quite a mental burden. Replaying every word I said to a jury wondering if I inadvertently biased them, hoping the foundations I have laid for my children send them in a trajectory that keeps them happy and safe, and always second guessing whether I’ve done enough to support my students or if my form of support is not the best approach. You must be thinking that sounds incredibly egotistical and self-centered within the context of a prolonged mass disaster where people are dying daily. That the last ten years I have emphasized this is not about me/us but about the conditions at the border, and that is true. What we’ve also seen over the last ten years is no real change in policies at the border that stop or slow the number of deaths. People are still dying in large numbers. The location may shift over time, but the situation is still dire.
Our forensic work within the massive scale of need at the border is small. We make a big difference to the individuals and families we directly contact, but after over a decade of work we are not seeing a tsunami of change. Instead, we are always left with questions – Did we do enough? What if we just searched more in that direction? What if we stayed out just one more hour? What if we stayed just one more day? But I do see the tsunami building within the hearts and minds of our young people. There’s over thirty faculty and students from the University of Indianapolis alone that have traveled with the Beyond Borders Team to participate in this work. We also work with numerous other universities and students in the Texas Borderlands. They are experiencing this crisis with a lens and perspective that my generation just does not have. I am able to quiet the questions and the overthinking knowing this experience sets them a trajectory quite different then had they not experienced this.
This trip will be different. We will be working solely with Remote Wildlands Search and Recovery on large scale search and recovery efforts in clandestine ranchlands. I am excited to see Deputy Don White, Paramedic Ray Gregory, and any other members that may be able to join us. They are wonderful humans that do great work! We lost Eddie Canales, the Director of the South Texas Human Rights Center and my friend to cancer a few months ago. I still expect to see his smile, hear his laugh, listen to all his new stories and get scolded for not improving my Spanish since the last trip. Eddie also contributed to that tsunami, and I know we will make him proud this trip. The South Texas Human Rights Center continues, and you can make a donation is his memory here.
~KEL