An Actual Lemming
An actual lemming is not to be confused with a metaphorical lemming. Actual lemmings are just like voles and are in the same family. Metaphorical lemmings, on the other hand, engage in circular firing squads, threaten to stop writing, breathing, and eating until something happens. It's always until something. And what is the particular something? Nothing less than the perfection of human conduct and the demilitarization pacification of politics.
Join me over the cliff.
Lemmings, it turns out, don't actually throw themselves off cliffs. That was total nonsense. No animal or group of animals is so insane as to engage in this kind of insane self destruction. Any animal that had these tendencies would long ago have been extinct:
The myth of lemming mass suicide is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. In 1955, Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title: The Lemming with the Locket. This comic, which was inspired by a 1954 National Geographic article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs.[7]. The suicide myth was further propagated by Walt Disney documentary White Wilderness in 1958 which includes footage of lemmings migrating and running head-long over a ledge. An investigation in 1983 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Brian Vallee, showed that the Disney film makers faked the entire sequence using imported lemmings (bought from Inuit children), a snow covered turntable on which a few dozen lemmings were forced to run, and literally throwing lemmings into the sea to show the alleged suicides.[8] This myth is also witnessed in a German film - The Little Polar Bear (Lars, the polar bear)--in which a group of despondent lemmings are frequently jumping off various ledges.[9]
wiki source
So, the model for the metaphorical lemming so-called suicides was really a mass kidnapping by Disney company stooges culminating in mass murder. Note to self: lemming tactics are not a good idea for survival, Disney is not a good company to work for, either.
How, I would like to know, can we stop ourselves from acting as if we were metaphorical lemmings? Don't we understand that refusing to write, breathe, and eat isn't a strike, it's an insult to those who actually toil at real jobs and have to strike for better wages and working conditions. Don't we understand that writing at this blog isn't working?
Maybe the correct metaphor isn't lemmings. Maybe it's the dodo.