Me, Chicken Little, and the 'Boy Who Cried Wolf'

One day Chicken Little was walking in the woods when an acorn fell on his head.
"Oh my goodness!" said Chicken Little. "The sky is falling! I must go and tell the king.

Most of you know the rest, in some versions the fox gets the chicken and his friends.

Then there's the tale of the 'Boy who cried wolf' who comes to a bad end for lying about a threat to get attention.

These fables and others like them permeate our society. We live in a world where we refuse to believe in some threats, because some other threats aren't real. It's a strange and troubling disconnect.

The following dichotomies are typical of this fabulist point of view. Global climate change requires massive international efforts to correct... Global terrorism is a simple law enforcement issue. American imperialism is heinous in the eyes of the world... Islamic imperialism can be dealt with by talking it over. Which is the fable and which is reality waiting to bite you on the ass?

Chicken Little was concerned that the sky was falling; so concerned that he ignored the threat posed by the fox. Once the fox had eaten the issue of the whether the sky was falling no longer mattered to Chicken Little.

Was the Boy at fault or was it the townspeople who refused to come when the threat was real?

We haven't suffer another attack like 9/11 since 9/11. Do we now ignore the threat because the threat colors change and nothing happens?

It's a puzzle with missing pieces. Some will still try to put the puzzle together while pretending the missing pieces are of no concern.

So how and and why does any of this matter? A narrow focus means that peripheral things will be missed. Too broad a focus means that narrowly critical things will be missed. Here's my clue. I won't let fables and wishful thinking shape my world view. If you wax and wane with whatever tide floats your boat you'll wind up under water, or to stretch the analogy, you'll wind up eaten by the fox or the wolf.