An Overview of Lemmingism

I’ve given this a lot of thought. Well, at least a couple of days’ worth of it… or maybe more like an hour or so. Well, okay – about 15 minutes, because that’s all that is really required to address the issue of the Modern Lemmings and their addiction to Lemmingism.

Lemmings, as most of you know, are pack animals that migrate in herds, or so the mythos goes. They’re supposedly so dumb that if someone tells them to jump off a cliff, they’d run right up to the edge and take the plunge. We’ve already seen Lemmings gather in large groups to do things that have an air of Da Stoopid to the more rational among us. For instance, running into a store that is closed by breaking the large plate glass windows, while wearing dark clothing and ripping off with everything portable, is one memorable episode, especially since current electronic equipment can make these Lemmings easily identifiable. Another is building a human dam at a major university at one gate to block the flow of cross-campus traffic, which real students just bypass them about eight feet away.

There are other incidents as well, almost too numerous to mention, but most of them involved a strange need to start bonfires when the weather is really quite nice. Perhaps these Urban-dwelling Lemmings don’t understand that a utility bill for electricity or gas, for cooking and/or heating, has to be paid and the utility company shut off the power or gas. Used to be you started a bonfire to roast hot dogs, sing silly songs, and roast marshmallows.  Perhaps these Urban-dwelling Lemmings never had the experience of group companionship at summer camp. If so, it’s a shame. Summer camp, and even Hallowe’en camp were fun.

Mind you, these are not the small, furry rodents who became legends for doing dumb things because Disney cameramen chased them off a cliff. (Yes, they did. Bad boys!) These are physically adult humans who act rather like small, furry, stupid, legendary rodents, but aren’t nearly as smart as the cliff-dwelling rodents.

One of the co-characteristics shared by wild lemmings, those cute little Arctic tundra rodents, and urban-dwelling Lemmings, those nasty, loud-mouthed, destructive, dumbass types, is that they both suffer population explosions on a recurring basis. With the wild ones, it’s frequently a seasonal thing related to food, females and fighting, as they are well-known for their warning displays and aggressive behavior towards predators, including Hoomans.

With Urban-dwelling Lemmings, the population growth takes longer to generate, as much as eight years until the demographic per urban area has become densely-packed and visible during the daytime, as well as at night. If you wonder why the Urban-dwelling Lemmings are out on the street corners at night, instead of at home doing their homework or laundry, it’s because they are Lemmings. They gather in pods or herds, speak in incomprehensible languages, and plan raids on the unsuspecting Hoomans who are unaware of their Lemmingism.

Both species tend to be vegetarian by nature, the wild tundra lemmings consisting almost entirely on roots, seeds and grasses, while the urban-dwelling Lemmings tend to graze several hours per day on lettuces, sprouted roots, quinoa and other seeds, and tofu. Not a lot of difference there, if you get my drift.

The wild lemmings instinctively seek out others of their kind for procreation and migratory companionship, and spend a good amount of time on practicalities such as stuffing themselves with whatever natural bounty is available, as well as loading grasses, fungi, seeds, and roots into their personal pantries as provisions for wintering over, while they’re prepping for a population explosion.

The Urban-dwelling Lemmings do have some seminal concept of the real world, but it is distorted by their population density and herd choices. While they do forage for food and protective wear, their notions of how to procure such things lean toward creating drastic urban disturbances while ripping off stores and setting fires.

Indeed, even the thought processes of the wild lemmings and the Urban-dwelling Lemmings seem to be similar. For example, we will generally agree that 2 + 2 = 4. Urban Lemmings will argue to the very death with you that 2+2 = 5, and will go to great lengths to explain how they reach that conclusion, while completely missing one important point: 2+2 can also equal 6.

On the other hand, wild lemmings, when confronted with such a simple mathematical concept as “2+2 equals something”, will blink and show you very quickly that 2+2 = 6 to 10, depending on weather, food resources, available shelter, and available males; hence their regular and very real population explosions.

Therein lies the difference between wild lemmings and Urban-dwelling Lemmings. The wild lemming as a genus has a very direct, real-world, real-time approach to life. The Urban-dwelling Lemmings, as a population group and species, are bound by the Tenets of Lemmingism to ignore the real-world, find safe spaces to hide from the Daylight of Truth, and to swallow without question whatever Unwisdom they are fed, no matter how rancid, infested and stale it is, or how much it clashes with the Reality that they utterly abhor and deny, and wish to destroy.

The wild tundra-dwelling lemmings, as a genus of up to thirty species, are well able to take care of themselves. They can adapt quickly and easily to changes in their environment, and survive undisturbed by those changes. They can find food, shelter and companionship without trouble. The females of all tundra-dwelling lemmings tend to be rather fat, but the fat is the reserve they build for survival and for supporting their offspring.

The Urban-dwelling Lemmings are a different problem. Taking into consideration that The Times, They Are A-Changin’, and are forecast to be changin’ drastically for the next 85 to 90 years, (well beyond the lifetimes of most Urban-dwelling Lemmings), it is not an inhuman or politically incorrect thing to propose that their species be allowed to become extinct. This means do not feed them, do not house them, do not clothe them, and have them spayed and neutered at a low-cost vet clinic.

After all, if the wild tundra-dwelling lemming can be, and is, a self-sufficient little furball that does quite well on its own, we can attempt to instill that quality in the Urban-dwelling Lemmings by giving them a push in the right direction. We can acknowledge their herd instinct and their need for a Safe Space. A reservation of unused land, perhaps some place near a decommissioned nuclear reactor in the Pacific Northwest or coastal California, would do nicely. Build a wall around it, tell them it’s all theirs and they can do whatever they wish, but they can’t leave – kind of like that movie (The Village) about people who wanted to leave the real world and build a brick wall to hide behind. Oh, wait – didn’t some bunch of Urban-dwelling Lemmings do that recently in Seattle?  Might snow early up there, from what I’ve been seeing.

Category: "Teh Stoopid"