Chicken Little Was a Fucking Lunatic
A decade or so ago, when I lived in Northcenter, there was a guy - we assumed he was homeless but he always had clean clothes and solid shoes so we might have been off in our assumptions - would print up flyers about the vast conspiracies of the government bringing the End of Democracy and the subjugation of the American People under foreign rule. He would put them on cars, he would hand them out to people walking by, he would ramble a blue streak about it for hours.
No one - NO ONE - thought anything other than "This guy is nuts." His rhetoric was bizarre, hyperbolic and smelled of the same sort of bullshit spun by conservatives during the eight years of the Obama administration.
"[The President] has set racial relationships in the nation back 100 years with his divisional rhetoric."
"I suspect that groups bused in a bunch of thugs so the media could beat this narrative about evil."
"The climate that's created, in part by the presidential administration, encourages dissent and encourages conflict by not denouncing it."
"I think the President has been the most ignorant president in our history. His views of the world as he says don’t jibe and the world is a mess."
"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for the President to be a one-term president."
For eight years conservatives painted the Obama administration as the worst of all possible realities. Each quote above was about Obama but have all been said about Trump by the Left. Going online (because where else you gonna go? The library?) one can read article after article deriding the dangers of the Trump presidency in the exact same tone and language used to deride the Obama administration:
- A real threat to the country
- Destroying democracy
- He has to be removed from office before he does any more damage
- He cheated and used outside forces to trick an increasingly gullible public
- THE FATE OF THE COUNTRY IS BALANCED ON IMPEACHING HIM
Yes, Trump is embarrassing and awful. He courts racists and hates women. He's dumb as a bucket of orange hair. It has been a year into his presidency and what has he done? Made a lot of noise, provided a lot of clickbait distraction, appointed lots of bad actors hell-bent on dismantling any sense of progress in this country.
And yet the ACA is still the law of the land. Abortion is still a Constitutional right. Despite his rhetoric, his deportation rate is lower than Obama's deportation rate. Under his leadership, the GOP-run House and Senate have passed NO major initiatives. No wall has been built. While he is straining international relations, no wars have been started.
Perhaps it's time to admit that maybe these are all acorns and the lunatic Chicken Little Syndrome is now ours to acknowledge. The Right owned it for eight years and now it's ours.
Chicken Little Syndrome (from the Urban Dictionary)
Every time someone believes the hype behind an apocalyptic theory that will end the world, and the hysteria that ensues. It is an old cumulative tale about a chicken (or a hare in an early version) who believes the world is coming to an end. The phrase "The sky is falling" has passed into the English language as a common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.
The Bush administration used our tendency to believe in this sort of doomsday spin to scare us into believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons he didn't have and thrust us into the longest war in our history. Intelligent people voted in favor of the preemptive strike on Iraq. No one is immune to the hype.
An aspect of this is that as we increasingly believe the nonsense, we lose steam to act responsibly. Right now, the only responsible and pro-active thing we can be doing is voting for Progressives and dogmatically, zealously supporting candidates who platform progressive ideals.
The sky is NOT falling. Don't believe the hype, hunker down and get the job of democracy accomplished.
