Mostly, lemmings are most famous for the long, forced suicide marches they allegedly take. But a lemming trying to scare off a potential threat looks a lot like an explosion of fur. That, it turns out, is not technically accurate. For many centuries, it was believed that lemmings got so angry, they would literally explode. How they got here was never as compelling, however, as how they left. Then, as science evolved, it was held that lemmings were delivered by the wind. Back in the 1500s, scientists thought lemmings originated by falling out of the sky during stormy weather. Given their forbidding environment, lemming behavior is not as well understood as perhaps it should be. In fact, it will attack, even though doing so typically spells curtains for certain. All the rest of the body is covered in a loud black-and-white motif.Ī lemming, when confronted by a possible predator, barks loudly and angrily rather than running away and hiding. The hindquarters are bright yellow, better to aid sexual ingress and egress. In fact, they look like a quilt your drunk, blind grandmother might have sewn together late at night. Lemmings, by contrast, take great pains to do just the opposite.

In the world of rodents, most species take great pains to blend quietly into their surrounding as a defense mechanism. Failing that, they band together into tight clusters of wool and mutton and let the big-horned rams take care of business. By contrast, sheep - who, it turns out, can actually see what’s behind them - tend to trot quickly off to higher, inaccessible ground when threatened by a predator. Like many of the live-free-and-die anti-vaxxers I know, the lemming has selected a peculiar survival mechanism: the art of being loud, garishly colored, and foolishly aggressive in the face of predators. If “sheeple” like myself who mindlessly support mask mandates and vaccine requirements can be tagged with the label “sheep,” then the people doing the tagging need to be known for what they truly are: lemmings. Lemmings are those tiny little arctic rodents that in the popular imagination are forever hurling themselves off cliffs in mass suicidal stampedes. Second, the alternative to the sheep is the lemming. They’re a lot more interesting than that. I would like to point out two things: First, sheep get a bad rap. In this rich tradition, who in their right mind would want to be seen as a sheep? In war of words and rhetoric raging over COVID, this stuff matters.

At the time, Washington was expressing concerns about the fragility of the First Amendment. They go so quietly and obediently into someone else’s long good night. Since the days of George Washington, we’ve been told how sheep are forever being led to slaughter. You don’t get much more economic than that. In two simple syllables, it makes its argument. But the American people, he lamented, were sheep, and they would be led by the lying media.Ī word he did not use - but easily could have when throwing down over our collective “sheep-ness” - was “sheeple.” To be honest, I’m sorry he didn’t. It constituted an infringement upon our inalienable rights, he argued. This being America - where inside out has become upside down - this has generated a level of soul searching that can only be described as gratuitously self-destructive.Įarlier this week, I heard from a union leader opposed to the school district’s imposition of a vaccine mandate. With herd immunity for the new Delta variant now defined as 90 percent compliance, as opposed to the 70 percent its predecessor required, how else are we supposed to get there? Masks are becoming mandatory again vaccinations can only be a few steps behind.

As we find ourselves pseudo-celebrating this year’s phantom Fiesta - kinda-sorta called off because of the Delta variant - the above-mentioned question, normally debated only by those in the animal husbandry biz, takes on a new and urgent resonance.

Lemmings jumping off cliffs myth disney