>“If our housing plan fails, we have to be prepared for builders to come in here and go to court and say, ‘I’m building what I want on any piece of property I can get, as long as I include affordable housing,’” Pfund explained. “I don’t think I’m being Chicken Little crying the sky is falling on that, but we have to be very careful.” – Ridgewood, NJ Mayor David T. Pfund, August 12, 2009
There are many versions of the Chicken Little story, but the basic premise is that a chicken eats lunch one day, and believes the sky is falling down because an acorn falls on her head. She decides to tell the King, and on her journey meets other animals who join her in the quest. In most retellings, the animals all have rhyming names such as Henny Penny, Cocky Lockey and Goosey Loosey. Finally, they come across Foxy Loxy, a fox who offers the chicken and her friends his help.
After this point, there are many endings. In the most famous one, Foxy Loxy eats the chicken’s friends, but the last one, usually Cocky Lockey, survives long enough to warn the chicken and she escapes. Other endings include Foxy eating them all; the characters being saved by a squirrel or an owl and getting to speak to the King; the characters being saved by the King’s hunting dogs; even one version in which the sky actually falls and kills Foxy Loxy.
Depending on the version, the moral changes. In the “happy ending” version, the moral is not to be a “Chicken”, but to have courage. In other versions the moral is usually interpreted to mean “do not believe everything you are told”. In the latter case, it could well be a cautionary political tale: The Chicken jumps to a conclusion and whips the populace into mass hysteria, which the unscrupulous fox uses to manipulate them for his own benefit, sometimes as supper.
So, if you believe Ridgewood Mayor David T. Pfund is Chicken Little, who do you think the unscrupulous fox is in Ridgewood?
