Chicken Little<\/a> is one such story. The diminuitive foul who determines Armageddon is at hand after being struck on the head by an acorn.\u00a0 The story proceeds with Chicken Little determining the best course of action is to tell the king whereupon a journey commences and various encounters with other creatures ensue.\u00a0 Depending on which version of the story is told, a final encounter with a deceitful fox who manipulates the circumstances brings about a close call or bad ending to the story.<\/p>\nI find several interesting parallels to current events.<\/p>\n
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\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 Though prompted by a real act (the falling acorn),\u00a0 Chicken Little over-reacts and in doing so completely misreads the situation and arrives at the wrong conclusion.\u00a0 No time is taken to assess what really happened, why it happened, and what possible responses should be considered.\u00a0 Today we would call that a\u00a0 “rush to judgment”.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 Chicken Little’s plan of action is to seek someone in governmental authority (tell the king) – as if any authority could be of help if the sky was indeed falling.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 Chicken Little whips everyone else into a frenzy of panic.\u00a0 The other characters are gullible – willing to believe what they have been told by Chicken Little because they don’t know any better themselves.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 Foxy Loxy is an opportunist who sees the chance to exploit a problem for personal gain.\u00a0 And it really doesn’t matter to the fox whether the problem is real or imagined.\u00a0 What matters is that the fox uses the situation to get what he wants.<\/p>\n
What worries me about our current “Chicken Little” moment is that this is not a fable, it is quite real.\u00a0 The stakes are high.\u00a0 The repercussions long-lasting and profound.<\/p>\n
Admittedly the acorn in our story is no small seed pod from a tree.\u00a0 It is not my intent to trivialize the financial market mess. But I do find it fascinating how our real-life characters are strikingly similar to the ones in the story. Instead of Chicken Little, Henny Penny, et al<\/em>, we have an indeterminate but evidently ever-increasing portion of our citizenry who think government is the answer to every problem.\u00a0 This, by the way, is what got us into the problem in the first place. And of course we have the federal government, an uneasy assimialtion of both Chicken Little and Foxy Loxy.\u00a0 With the all too familiar battle cry of, “We’ve got to DO something,” the gain they apparently seek is even more government intrusion, control, regulation, and jurisdiction.\u00a0 The seeming impossibility of a happy ending to this story is deeply alarming.<\/p>\nI can’t help but imagine a time and place in the not-too-distant future when another story will be told.\u00a0 “Once upon a time….there was this great experiment in liberty and self-determination known as The United States of America.<\/p>\n