The butterfly, The Copter Rotor, And Walter Reed

This is hard because I don’t know what to think.

The other day while watching TV we saw the president’s helicopter lift off from The South Lawn and head for Walter Reed Hospital.

Then we went out to the balcony. About ten miles away, above the Washington Monument, we saw a tiny helicopter heading our way … getting bigger and bigger until it banked to the right toward the hospital a couple miles to our south.

It disappeared behind the tall Nuclear Regulatory Commission building which blocks our view of Bethesda. About the time the copter crossed the DC line into Maryland I had an indescribable feeling in my stomach. It keeps coming back.

I am pretty sure the propounders of The Chaos Theory are right. It sometimes is called the Butterfly Theory because an oversimplification says something like this … when a butterfly in the Kaiser’s garden flapped its wings it may have been the beginning of the wind that blew into the sails of the German immigrants ships that landed in New York.

Or that everything that seems small is just a part of a much bigger pattern … and, importantly, everything is interconnected. A rainstorm is just a small part of a bigger weather system. Hurricanes look like galaxies from the International Space Staton. A modern map of the Universe looks suspiciously like a scan of the human brain. (Really, look it up.)

So, if a butterfly’s wings can do so much, what can the speeding rotors of a helicopter produce?

poor georgie’s almanack, 10.6.2020