Running With Lemmings

I am a product of the fifties. Growing up in the US during that time was exhilarating. I remember cool summer nights when we lay in the grass and searched the starry sky for satellites.

But what I remember most about that time was when we got a television. It was a huge wooden cabinet with a black and white picture. It opened the world to us.

Prior to that, for entertainment in the evenings, when we had finished our homework, we sat in the living room listening to our mother reading from the encyclopedia. Truth. The salesman told her that it would improve our minds but it had to be read regularly.

To be fair, she always tried to find something that would keep the interest of three little boys, and would read with a sense of dramattic flair. But she was no match for Disney.

Dad really wanted to watch wrestling later at night but convinced Mom that the new television was an excellent learning medium for us boys because we would get the story as well as images. He pointed to Disney's "True Life Adventure" series.

That show was my introduction to lemmings. I was fascinated to learn that they lived near the Arctic circle, under the snow much of the time. They were tribal, fractious, irascible and cute. ("NO! No lemmings. Our weather is much too warm for a pet lemming").

But, to me, the most fascinating part of that show, the fact that made the lemming stand out amongst all of the critters we were introduced to, was their proclivity to self destruction. Every few years, when the tribe got too big for their home habitat, a faction of lemmings would volunteer to take a long walk off a short cliff.

Here is a voice-over quote I found (wikipedia, where else?) delivered by the smooth voiced narrator of the show, Winston Hibler:

"A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny".

You can hear his voice in your head even now, as you read that, can't you?

Having set the scene, we were treated to actual footage of lemmings by the hundreds scrambling over snow-covered tundra, struggling, undeterred over obstacles, forcing themselves forward on their short legs until finally, exhausted, they reach the sea. You know what came next. They paused only a moment and the flung themselves into the ocean. Sacrificing their lives for the good of the tribe.

For twenty formative years, while growing up, I believed that to be true.

Then I happened to see an article debunking the suicide myth. It seems the lemming's PR agents joined with Disney to spin a normal walkabout into an honorable sacrifice. Disney promoted the lemming's noble ethos but it was really fake news.

Why did Disney do this? Some speculate it was simply for the drama. I have a different theory.

I think the establishment, back then, was worried about population explosion and the surging baby boom. They foresaw food and housing shortages. Lumber shortages ("there are not enough trees in our forests to make the pencils these kids will need at school...") and clogged highways. Who knows what other orwellian justification they used to perpetuate the myth they had created.

And it worked. Seventysix million boomers grew up believing it was their duty to take one for the gipper. Like the lemmings, they would be called on, one day, to decide "do I stay or do I go?"

I am absolutely certain that many of them never knew the 'lemming leap' had been faked. It is the only reason I can come up with to justify the singular event of 8 November 2016 when millions of boomers stumbled lemming-like to their polling places and jumped.

Then the cold water hit.