Thursday, June 5, 2014

Learning From Lemmings


One thing television does rather well is nature programs, and the other day I stumbled into a film essay on the little rodent called the lemming. This little guy is found here and there in the tundra region of the Arctic, and survives quite well on grasses, small grains, grubs and whatnot. This, in spite of being hunted relentlessly by owls, falcons, stoats and the like.

Of course, being highly prolific helps, and it is this survival mechanism that has led to the myth of lemmings committing mass suicide when numbers grow too great for the environment to support them. As the show pointed out, this was not so much a mass suicide venture as it was migratory behaviour initiated by an instinct that the land could no longer sustain the majority of them.

So off a goodly portion went.

The suicide aspect came about when tales of lemmings jumping off cliffs or drowning in mass numbers in a lake became local, then national, lore.* This was nonsense, and the program stressed that such occurrences were mistakes on the part of the migrating lemmings -- the lake was larger than they were able to swim across, or an unforeseen chasm was seen too late to be avoided.

Here a thought occurred to me along the lines of the following.

The lemming's instinct was honed to its capability to survive. When, for instance, it realizes that further demands on the environment would result in it not being able to support the growing numbers of lemmings, starvation and eventual extinction would loom.

My thought -- Why cannot public service unions see what is obvious to lemmings, but not to themselves? A continually increasing membership wanting greater and greater wages and benefits to be drawn from a workers' tax base that grows smaller and smaller can result in the situation being presently faced in Greece, and to a lesser extent, Spain and Portugal. Such action puts a stress on a government that sooner or later will be unable to meet the demand.

An aside: Private sector unions are a different kettle of fish. Any negotiation is a tug of war between union and management, with no third party involved. If the negotiation fails and a strike is called, the company goes under, or the union collapses, or, more rarely, the union takes over management from the company. Unlike a public union strike, their is no innocent third party such as the public itself (or, worse, children, when there is a job action on the part of teachers). This aspect of the discussion, however, takes us away from the main thrust of the argument.

Now I am not suggesting that a large number of such union members fling themselves over cliffs or undertake a swim that they could not complete, but I am suggesting that the members give due consideration to lemmings, who see the need to alter their behaviour in order that all may succeed, and make the sacrificial decisions that result in this coming about. Otherwise.....well, it won't be pleasant.

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* The Disney Academy Award winning film, White Wilderness, showed lemmings (imported from Calgary) jumping off a cliff to certain death. In a later CBC documentary, Cruel Camera, found that the lemmings DID NOT jump off the cliff, but were launched off a turntable. The Award still stands. -- Ed.

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