The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost
What in the heck does this idiom mean?
Evidently, the first usage of this idiom was in 1809 when Robert Southy wrote in the Curse of Kehama that “ Curses are like chickens: they always come home to roost.”
What confounds me is the premise that chickens were not in a coop; rather, they were what we call today free range.
In 1809, this country was unpopulated, wild, and dangerous. That chickens might be haphazardly scratching around in New England forests, Southern tundra and Western valleys foraging for grains tests my understanding of poultry in general. Wouldn’t early settlers build coops for chickens to be contained? Or would they let them hang out, hunting and pecking over by the wood pile?
We know that wolves, foxes, and coyotes would have been slinking along, looking for tender chickens.
At any rate, this idiom has found its way into modern parlance to indicate that past actions often determine present outcomes.
Those of us who have watched California governance deteriorate in the last thirty years, are not surprised by the mass conflagration that has wiped the City of Palisades off the map.
Those outnumbered voters with common sense in California have been powerless to provide any thoughtful and practical checks and balances to a legislature and Governor’s office run by social justice Democrats who have the common sense of a chicken wandering around looking for barley in the middle of a grassland teeming with predators.
What we see on television in the governance of Los Angeles agencies which are tasked with providing basic protection (water in a fire) for tax paying citizens, illegal aliens, and the largest homeless population in the United States, is total incompetence.
I remember the Sega video game called Angry Birds.
Those angry birds are definitely coming home to roost in Los Angeles and in Sacramento, where the Head Dolt we have for a governor may wish he were safely ensconced in his new Marin County home.
Ironically, most of the people who have lost their homes voted for Governor Newsom.
Their blue roosts, however, are burnt to a crisp now and there will be hell to pay.
Angry birds, indeed.
The chickens are coming home to roost.
Yes, the Mayor of LA was speechless as she was questioned. Angry Birds indeed. The Buzzards are circling.
From what I've gleaned, the 'repairs' that emptied the Santa Ynez reservoir were to its cover, not to the structure of the reservoir itself. If that's so, it theoretically could have been filled while repairs to the EPA mandated cover were made, but EPA regulations wouldn't allow it. Down here in hurricane country, lakes and reservoirs are regularly drained ahead of storms (or possible storms) and then allowed to refill. You would think that -- oh, never mind.
Another interesting aspect to all this is the repairing and rebuilding. I wonder if it's going to be far slower and more difficult than necessary because of the layers of regulations piled on top of the process.