Bud Light and Butterflies

August 23, 2011


Today I planted a butterfly bush on Liberty Street. The one I planted last summer did not survive, probably because of the ice-melting salt that had been used on the sidewalk and street over the winter, but this time I tried to choose a safer location, set back a few feet from the sidewalk, in a corner of the property where two privet hedgerows meet. The privet had been overgrown, leggy and covered with vines, but a little pruning and weeding has done them much good. Something that produces flowers seemed called for.

The house next door seems pretty much deserted, and its yard overgrown, so the privet corner with the buddleia represents a border in more than one respect.

The plant's blooms are a deep royal blue. I gave an identical plant to my friend Stu, to be planted behind his place on Lander Street, in a small yard that is abuts a large vacant lot, both surrounded by an eight-foot chain link fence. The formal name of the plant, buddleia, sounded to Stu like "BudLight", which seems like an appropriate name

Lander Street is even tougher than Liberty Street. Newburgh needs butterflies.

The book I Never Saw Another Butterfly first appeared when I was a teenager. It was a collection of poems and drawings by children in the Teresienstat concentration camp. Since then, my mind has always connected butterflies with the holocaust, as though the eternal war between good and evil could be reduced to these two ideas.

To me, the conditions inside America's most blighted cities are tantamount to a holocaust. There are a great many children trapped in these modern ghettos. They are surrounded by rampant drug use and alcoholism, and violence is an everyday fact of life. Prostitutes ply the corners; physical abuse of women and children is taken for granted. The fathers, or "baby daddies", tend to be frequent guests of the state correctional system. In fact, a man who has not done his "bid", as a term of incarceration is called, has limited cred on the street.

There is a mistaken impression that ghettoes are all black, but my observation is that the colors are mixed, and while African-Americans are the dominant group, the culture of despair and hopeless disaffection cuts across a wide swath of ethnic backgrounds.

It may not seem like much to plant a butterfly bush on Liberty Street, but if the plant survives, perhaps a butterfly or two will drawn there, and then perhaps a child will have a moment of wonder and hope.