Have you ever read the story of “Chicken Little“?  If you haven’t, come close and allow me to paint you a picture.

The falling of an acorn upon the head of Chicken Little resulted in a belief that the sky was falling.  Because Chicken Little believed so strongly that this was the case, she ran to find the King, who she believed could protect her, and the rest of the world, from impending doom.  Along the way, there were others of whom Chicken Little came across and warned of this unfolding Apocalypse.  Despite observational evidence to contrary, they were all swept away by the flood of Chicken Little’s fear, even to the point of trusting the real threat, a very cordial, yet malicious, fox.  The fox very nearly had enough food to last him a few days (going by the original story, he actually did eat Chicken Little and her crew), but at the last possible moment, the King’s hunting dogs scared the fox away, and that fox was never to be seen again.  By the end of this charming tale, Chicken Little is given an umbrella, which protects her from falling acorns and, thus, the delusion of the sky falling.

What does this sound like to you?

To me, it sounds like the Gun Control debate, or the Wars on Drugs and Terror, or the threat that the equality of the LGBT community under the law of the land presents to the moral and familial foundations of the United States of America.

Politics and the media have become little more than children’s’ stories, regurgitated hype created through misleading facts and out-of-context soundbites meant to make us believe the sky is, indeed, falling.  The problem is, the sky isn’t falling.  Anyone who is paying attention to the world around them can see this.  No, we have not yet come to the Apocalypse; what has happened is that an acorn has fallen upon our heads and, instead of addressing our walking through a forest full of trees that have nothing but time on their hands to plot our demise by first, distracting us with acorns, the prelude to their plan to wipe us out with chemical weapons (refer to M. Night Shyamalan‘s infamous documentary, “The Happening“), we run to the king to inform him the sky is falling so that he may protect us.  And what does the king do?

The king gives us an umbrella that helps distract us from the falling acorns whenever we go on our walks through the forest.  He doesn’t explain that the sky is not falling, and that the trees are preparing to put us in a vegetative state.  No, he simply gives us the means by which to ignore the real problem: the proliferation of acorn arms.

It doesn’t stop there, though.  Politicians and media corporations share much in common with the boy who cried wolf.  In league with the fringe “thinkers” of society, those we may call conspiracy theorists (or faerie tale ciphers) are telling us time and time again that there’s a wolf.  The NRA does this often.  The wolf, in this case, is a liberal president (who is, in all actuality, a centrist) coming to take away all the guns and install a totalitarian regime bent on suppressing every freedom that has not yet been stripped away by the Patriot Act or the recent manifestations of the National Defense Authorization Act.  Of course, there is some truth to this, but not so far as the revelations of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World“.  We’re dealing with a pretty incompetent wolf, if so.

Eventually, in “The Boy Who Cried Wolf“, a wolf does show up.  By then, nobody believes the poor kid and he meets his untimely fate within the jaws of one of nature’s most formidable killing machines.

Most of us are becoming numb to the scare tactics employed by politicians and the media (whether they be liberal or conservative).  Because we’re becoming immune, desensitized, and less and less aware, we run the risk of, one day, the wolf actually showing up.  As Sherry Thomas said, “Even the boy who cried wolf [w]as right about the wolf once.”   When it comes, we won’t notice it because we’ve been so misdirected from the truth of matters, forced to consume three meals a day consisting of incoherent rhetoric with a side of bs at a quaint sidewalk cafe that has tables with no parasols to protect us from the rain that is really some juiced up pedestrian pissing on our legs.  In the interim, politicians are using scorched earth policies to restrict women’s’ rights while simultaneously building men made of straw to serve as ideological authorities on the nature of God and what God actually wants for the United States, whether it be the elimination of the LGBT community in the baleful conflagration of Hades or our commitment to spread the light of democracy over all the earth, whether anybody else wants it or not.

Much of what we hear and see from politicians and the media amounts to nothing more than faerie tales.  The problem is, the storytellers are getting better and better at making us believe in Santa Claus while simultaneously assuring us that the big bad man in the red, arctic fox fur-lined pajamas won’t invade our homes under the guise of delivering toys without a fight.  So much for the coal industry.

Our current state of affairs presents a unique threat to progress.  We stand to do to ourselves what the Mongols did to the Middle East, which is set ourselves back so far that it will take us several centuries to recover.  Why?  Because we can’t separate truth from fiction, facts from faerie tales.  We prefer these charming cartoons to the reality and, so long as we do, the reality is going to sneak up on us from the darkness of a dense woods and rip out our throats, and there will be nobody left to cry wolf.

Just a thought.  King me.

Related articles

• 6 Cautionary Tales That Terrified Kids of Yesteryear (mentalfloss.com)
• Filibuster Reform: Senators Reportedly Close To Deal On Modest Limits (huffingtonpost.com)
• ‘There is no alternative’ and the boy who cried wolf. (jondayblog.wordpress.com)
• Super Bowl fans cry ‘fowl’ over chicken wing shortage (mnn.com)
• End Of Days? There’s A Chicken Wing Shortage Ahead Of This Year’s Super Bowl (sportsgrid.com)