Chicken little

I could only laugh — ruefully — upon reading about the misguided effort to overhaul voting protocol in Lincoln County.

I’m reminded of the worn cliché, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”

I must say I’ve grown tired of election deniers and the paranoia they foment.

And when I read Commissioner Josh Letcher’s analogy of voting machines and airplanes that “fell out of the sky,” I could only compare it to the fabled children’s story featuring Chicken Little.

I was compelled to research some actual statistics in the U.S. regarding the risk of flying.

As for commercial carriers, there have been zero deaths since 2020. The odds of dying on a commercial flight between 2012 and 2016 were one in 3.37 billion. There are 40,000 plus flights daily carrying 2.6 million passengers.

As for all kinds of aircraft there were less than 1,200 accidents in 2021 resulting in less than 400 deaths, down from 1,800 accidents and more than 500 deaths in 2000.

Dr. Arnold Bennett, some kind of an egg-headed airplane expert from MIT says: “If you took one domestic flight a day, every day of the week, odds are you could go 36,000 years before you’d die in a plane crash.” Of course, all these stats might be phony, the result of a deep state hoax.

So, back to Chicken Little. It seems that Chicken Little was walking through the forest one day when an acorn fell on her head.

Assuming that the sky was falling she rushed to inform the king and, on her way, swept Henny Penny, Goosey Loosey and Lucky Ducky up in her paranoia.

Enter Foxy Loxy who listens to the ridiculous story, lures the four misguided fowl to his den and they were never seen again. Quoting from the analysis I read in Wikipedia: “The term ‘Chicken Little’ has become almost synonymous with alarmism with the term being used to describe people who needlessly stoke fear among people.

We might summarize the moral messages of the story as follows: 1) don’t form incorrect conclusions from insufficient data; 2) don’t stoke fear in others without good cause to do so; and 3) don’t take other people’s word for things, especially when those other people are making extraordinary claims (which should require extraordinary evidence).”

I can’t help but recall the plight of the alleged MAGA election fixers down in Georgia.

Perhaps we should pay more attention to MLCGA (Make Lincoln County Great Again) adherents right here in our own back yard.

Gary Montgomery, Fortine