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Cliffhanger

If you’re chained to someone bigger running towards a cliff edge, you yell at them to stop, you don’t say “they’re the majority”. When you’re already feeling the effects of their mad dash for the edge, you don’t presume jumping will make things any better. You certainly don’t want to jump to prove a point about what a disaster jumping will be. It won’t help much if you survive the fall, you’ll still end up a mangled mess.

If you actually liked the firm ground you were on, talk of new horizons at the bottom of the cliff is no reassurance, especially when you’ve just spent years climbing from the bottom of the cliff to the top. If you can’t stop them from jumping, you at least want a hang glider for a soft landing, or to circle back to firm ground, because once they jump, they’re going to discover that neither of you can fly—while claiming that you haven’t been flapping your arms hard enough, and that both of your imminent deaths are your fault.

A Twitter experiment.

6 September 2017 · Politics