Newmann: Scattered clouds
“The sky is falling!” — from the fable “Henny Penny”
In the original version of “Henny Penny,” the chicken of the same name is walking in the woods and gets hit in the head by an acorn falling from an oak tree. She immediately thinks the sky is falling. She subsequently tells all of her poultry friends (who have absurdly rhyming names like Goosey Loosey, Ducky Lucky and Turkey Lurkey) about the falling sky, and, alarmed, they all set off to warn the king.
En route to the king, the birds run into Foxy Loxy, who asks them what all the fuss is about. When they tell him, he offers to guide them to the king. They accept his offer but, instead of taking them to the king, he leads them to his lair where he proceeds to gobble all of them up.
Silly birds, clever fox.
So much for the falling sky. And for jumping to the wrong conclusions. And for fearmongering.
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If you’ve been paying any attention to the current news cycles, one aspect seems to stand out: it’s really tough to wrap your head around all of the “breaking” news that just seems to keep continually rolling in. Stuff you may have thought as only problematic — or even nonexistent — can seem to be probable or existent. And hard to digest. Especially before breakfast.
Between local, national and international news feeds, it’s hard to keep up with events — even if you have the time to try to keep up. Most of us have relatively busy lives and don’t have the extra time to research the news that keeps flitting by. Add in the commentary by the talking heads and your head can start to explode.
It’s tough to get even a perfunctory handle on all the events that seem to be taking place in such rapid-fire succession. Stories of the past hour can seem like old news while yesterday’s news is almost ancient history.
Unfortunately, it’s also easy to jump to conclusions on many issues … without having adequate information on the issues themselves. Or, sometimes, to think that the sky is falling.
But we’re still OK.
And the sky is still up there where it normally is.
Maybe for those of us down here on the ground, it’s just a matter of taking a deep breath (or seven) and then not succumbing to the crush of events that we cannot control. There’s also not much point in buying into any of the “Henny Penny” fearmongering or into the deceptions that rival those of the fox.
More importantly, we can’t afford to give up on — or ignore — those issues that we do (or can) have some sway over.
This is not meant to sugar-coat many of the weird current events. There’s no doubt that we are in uncertain times. But humans have lived in uncertain times since … well, since the beginning of humanity. Somehow, we’ve been able to keep on keeping on.
And, in the process, we’ve generally come to understand, unlike Henny Penny, that the falling acorns are … just acorns.
Tom Newmann splits his time between Edwards and Queenstown, New Zealand. He has been going winter-to-winter since 1986. He was also a journalist in Missoula, Montana, at the Missoulian for quite a few years. Email him at tsnnz12@gmail.com.
