When conservative cultural warriors, Twitter Trolls, or dyspeptic gasbags like Rush Limbaugh call you a “Special Snowflake”, I have discovered, to my chagrin, that they don’t mean it as a compliment. In their self-centered, egotistical world you have to be as emotionally tough and able to “take it” as they believe (somewhat erroneously to my way of thinking) they themselves are. They have no time for political correctness, safe spaces, or, apparently, manners polite enough not to get you killed on the mean streets where they never go. Being a retired school teacher who was once in charge of fragile young psyches trying to negotiate a cruel Darwinian world, I think I disagree with them.
Have you ever tried to draw a snowflake? Believe me, it is difficult. Snowflakes are hexagonal star-shapes with enough lace and filigrees in them to make it a nightmare to draw it with painfully arthritic hands. The one above took me an hour with ruler and compass and colored pencils, and it still doesn’t look as good as a first grader can create with scissors and folded paper. Much better to use a computer program to spit them out with mathematical precision and fractal beauty. That’s how all the tiny ones in the background were created. But even a computer can’t recreate the fragile, complicated beauty of real snowflakes.
You see how the fragile crystalline structures will break in spots, melt in spots, attach to others, and get warped or misshapen? That is the reason no two snowflakes are alike, even though they all come from the same basic mathematically precise patterns generated by ice crystals. Life changes each one in a different way.
And that, of course, is the reason this essay is really about people rather than mere physical artifacts of cold weather. Our fragilities and frailties are earned, and they make us who we are. I have a squinky eye like Popeye from playing baseball and getting hit by a pitch. I have a big toe that won’t bend from playing football. They both represent mistakes that I learned from the hard way.
As a teacher, I learned that bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders are very real things. I lost a job once to one of those. And I spent a long night talking someone out of suicide one horrible December. Forgive me, I had to take fifteen minutes just there to cry again. I guess I am just a “special snowflake”. But the point is, those things are real. People really are destroyed by them sometimes. And they deserve any effort I can make to protect them or help them make it through the night.
But people are like snowflakes. They are all complex. They are all beautiful in some way. They are all different. No two are exactly the same.
And I really think boorish bastards have no right to insist that we need to take safe spaces and sanctuaries away from them. Every snowflake has worth. Winter snow leaves moisture for seedlings to get their start every spring. If you are a farmer, you should know this and appreciate snowflakes. And snowflakes can be fascinating. Even goofy ones like me.
Catch a Falling Star 
Facebooking and Birdwalking
This is my bird-walking illustration. I know that it is totally the wrong picture for the job, but it is a bird walking, isn’t it.
It is not a stretch to suggest that most of what you find on Facebook is not real. Especially when it comes to the endless posting and sharing of topical political memes. I had thought when Facebook came out with their reaction-emoji thingies, that there was at least one I would never find a use for.
Boy! Was I ever wrong about that. Now that the gold-plated pumpkinhead that got himself elected somehow is busy with his markers and crayons making executive orders, it is about the only one that really fits anywhere.
We made a big mistake allowing Trump to play Prexy and be the one in charge of making the rules of the game. You all knew he was gonna cheat before the game even started, didn’t you? And it won’t last long. He is making allies like Australia into offended enemies. He is banning burn victims, heroic Iraqi translators, doctors, and researchers from coming into the country with their entry visas and green cards and other proof that they have a right to be here. He is burning up any goodwill and patience and level-headedness that we have tried to afford him. He will be impeached, or worse, sooner rather than later. And then we will have to live with the irreparable damage he has done.
And we probably deserve it. We have made mistakes before, and if we live long enough, we will make more in the future. But this was a big one. And I don’t have to feel happy about it. No matter what my conservative friends on Facebook tell me… or what names they call me.
So that’s where the bird-walking comes in. The mind has to wander away down paths of lesser resistance. We need to go where the sandpiper would go, walking down the beach to look for new and interesting-looking seeds to eat.
You really should add this to your Bob Ross Bible if you haven’t already.
All of my illustrations in this article, except for the walking bird, which I drew myself, are clipped directly from Facebook. Facebook is sometimes the soul source of wisdom for Village Idiots, and I should probably make an effort to be one less of the time. But it is also an excellent source of bird-walking topics that get my mind off the terrible things and onto free-floating tangents that take me to places my mind would really rather be.
I would’ve liked to have attended Pillsbury’s funeral, but the meme only gave the time and length of the service, not the date. I fear that by now I have missed it. But I am sure the service was well done.
Nostalgia memes on Facebook are great. They make me feel all squishy and sad again about the times long gone and how terrifyingly horrible they were compared to how terrible they are now.
Remember John Wayne Gacy? Or reports on television about the Viet Nam War? With pictures? Full color pictures of the My Lai Massacre in living color on NBC, with all the blood in bright red. Yeah, that stuff on TV kept us outdoors quite a lot.
But Facebook bird-walking is a dangerous sport. If you let it, it will eat up your whole life, minute by minute, hour by hour. And I’m not sure it makes you smarter in any way. I know some pretty stupid people who are on Facebook quite a lot.
Bird-walking at its best, though, is to coddiwomple. And though you don’t know where you are going, you will get there sooner or later, so you might as well look at the scenery and appreciate the irony along the way. Life should be a leisurely stroll, not a rush to get away from gold-plated pumpinheads with executive orders in their tiny, tiny hands.
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Filed under angry rant, battling depression, clowns, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, humor, irony, memes, Paffooney
Tagged as bird walking, Facebook, politics