Lemmings don’t commit mass suicide. It’s a myth popularized by a 1958 Disney documentary about the North American arctic. I didn’t know lemmings aren’t inherently suicidal until a few days ago. I learned about the myth and the movie reading John Green’s 2021 book The Anthropocene Reviewed. The book was a Christmas gift from my daughter. She described it as an up-beat antidote to our divided, mean-spirited times.
According to Green, lemmings “tend to have an especially extreme population cycle.” When breeding conditions are favorable, the lemmings are fruitful and multiply at an astounding rate. When that happens, the lemmings try to spread out. Sometimes the migrating rodents make it to safety. Sometimes they drown trying to cross a river. But the image of cliff-diving masses I had long held in my mind’s eye is pure fiction. It seems the Disney documentarians wanted to add a little drama to White Wilderness so they flew a bunch of lemmings from upstate New York to Calgary, where much of the lemming footage was shot. There “the filmmakers dumped the lemmings over (a) cliff from a truck and filmed them as they fell, and then eventually drowned,” Green writes.
A myth was born!
Today marks the 4th anniversary of the attack on the Capitol and I can’t help but think of the lemmings. We’ve become a nation of lemmings. I find it terribly ironic, given our penchant for touting our “rugged individualism” and “independent spirit.” We’ve mythologized the lonesome cowboy whose “horse and … cattle are his only companions” but have fallen into (sometimes armed) camps, where blind allegiance is most prized. This isn’t just a Trump phenomenon. The last election made clear, the tone-deaf Democratic leadership and their highly paid, poorly performing campaign “experts” left themselves wide open to charges of being out of touch with hard-working Americans who feel cut out of the American Dream. The charges stuck because the Democrat leadership is focused on divisive issues that just don’t matter to the vast majority of Americans. The Trumpublican Party has made a meal of them.
There was a time when we honored both individual accomplishment and the common good, but cooperation now seems out of fashion. Cut-throat competition is ascending. Greed is good. The widening gap between the haves and have-nots is well documented, but Americans struggling to make ends meet are dismissed as “losers” who just aren’t working hard enough.
Occasionally—particularly in the wake of natural or man-made disasters—communities rally. Partisanship is (mostly) put aside. We see the best of America. But we just can’t seem to sustain the notion that we are interconnected and that we can all do better when we pull together.
More than dozen years ago, both President Obama and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren were lambasted by their political opponents for having the temerity to suggest that successful, wealthy American entrepreneurs didn’t get rich all on their own.
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own—nobody,” Warren said in August 2011. “You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of use paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come to seize everything at your factory—and hire someone to protect against this—because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless—keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
About a year later at a campaign stop, Obama echoed Warren’s overall message of interdependence saying, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.”
And then, the usually articulate Obama stepped on his own message, saying, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” The gaff turned out to be political gold for his Republican critics.
Seeming to recognize what he had done, Obama tried to recover, but it was too late.
“The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together,” Obama said. “There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.”
A few days later Obama’s opponent, Mitt Romney, pounced. “To say that Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple, that Henry Ford didn’t build Ford Motors, that Papa John didn’t build Papa John Pizza … To say something like that, its not just foolishness. It’s insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America.”
Taken out of context, Obama’s statement does sound foolish and insulting, but the Romney camp wasn’t interested in context and the Democrats, as is so often the case, were incapable of articulating a coherent response to counter the cynical caricaturization of Obama’s message.
In hyper-partisan times it’s easy to pull a phrase out of a speech, pervert its meaning, and convince loyal lemmings to leap off a cliff. But as someone who benefited from the support of a loving extended family, dedicated and talented teachers, low-interest student loans, a relatively strong and stable economy, hard-fought union-won wages and benefits (including honest-to-goodness pensions), public parks, safe streets and caring working-class neighbors, I can say with certainty my American Dream was not all my own doing. That doesn’t mean I didn’t work hard or that I’m not proud of what I’ve done. It’s just an honest acknowledgment that I didn't do it alone.
If we truly want to Make America Great Again we should remember this.