BY WILLIAM R. FEIST AND DOMINIC ANDRADE
ANALYSIS
In chaos theory there is something called the butterfly effect in which, as the story goes, the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in Brazil may lead to a tornado touching down in Texas. Most people who hear this story dismiss it as fictitious and fanciful. Nevertheless, if climatic conditions are just right, a butterfly can conceivably cause catastrophic weather by simply flapping its wings.
Evidently, the meteorological event from the butterfly effect appears to have a human parallel in what has been happening of late in North Africa and the Middle East. The popular uprisings that have occurred in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya started with a well-educated but disaffected young man who was forced to be a street vendor because there were no job prospects in his field of study in Tunisia. His plight was made unbearable when the authorities took away his makeshift stand because he was unable to purchase a vendor’s license, thus removing his only means of livelihood. Desperate and hopelessly despondent, the young man set himself ablaze.
