Chicken Little:
There are different versions to the story of the sky was falling.  Apparently one version was told by Buddha in about the 400’s BC, which would make the earliest version I have heard of.  In that case it was a hare, not a chicken, which became concerned.   Another version dates back to Alexander the Great in the 300’s BC when some Celts told him that nothing scared them short of the sky falling.  The version I recall may have come in part from Walt Kelly, the cartoonist. 

So my version is that once Chicken Little was struck on the head by a falling acorn.  He panicked and ran to a friend saying the sky was falling.  The friend joined him and the party grew, the humor depending on the names of the various recruits.  Eventually they reached the king, who looked into the matter, took them back to the scene of the incident, found the acorn and dismissed the matter as trivial. 

So Chicken Little in the end was seen as a bird of little intelligence and less composure. 

But I am forced to admire him.  I, too, have my sky falling proposition.  It’s simple.  It has been established that failing to marry kin will produce failure of sufficient fertility.  In the developed world we almost never marry kin.  So the developed world will decline, probably rather abruptly, until either our strategy changes or we are gone.  The developing world and everybody in between is likely to follow us.

But while Chicken Little was able to bring this to the attention of the duly constituted authorities, and able to do so in a time frame that did not produce such delay that remedial steps would have become impossible for sheer lack of time.  And the stout little chicken actually got the authorities to investigate until they got to the bottom of the matter.

I would give much to have that chicken’s heart, or brain, or charisma or whatever he had that I lack. 

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