According to The Guardian magazine, “Poor Little Snowflake” is the defining insult of 2016. The term emerged out of Brexit and the US election and is mainly lobbed by the right at what they consider to be the thin-skinned behavior and comments of the left. In September, the Guardian article says, Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos used it to dismiss a protester at a talk in Houston, declaring that it was his event, not the “silver-haired snowflake show”. “Madam, I’m grateful to you for coming, but to be quite honest with you, fuck your feelings,” he told her, as the crowd roared “USA! USA! USA!” in the background.

I’ve been called a snowflake plenty of times since the election. Anytime I make an observation about Trump and his team that the right does not like — it’s snowflake time. And this makes me curious. Really? I think. Is that be best you can do?

I mean, I’m happy to accept the moniker, but do these right wingers not understand how unique each and every snowflake is? How no two flakes, after withstanding turbulence and cold, ever settle to the ground looking the same? How the merging of hydrogen and oxygen, frozen and crystalized, creates a geometric wonder, a mathematical masterpiece, a soliloquy to symmetry?

More importantly, do these rough and ready Trump supporters not realize that snowflakes, when brought together, can paralyze roads and bridges, collapse roofs, shut down schools, fire departments, even the halls of government? Hell, entire cities can be brought to their knees when enough snowflakes gather.

“It came over the plains like a swollen fist, scooped up all of Chicago and casually tangled it in knots. The stricken metropolis lay gasping, barely able to move. The storm swatted it, slugged it, smashed it, crushed it in 75 million tons of snow.”

That was newspaperman M.W. Newman writing about the storm of 1967 for the Chicago Daily News. I remember that storm. I remember how beautiful and dangerous it was. How I could look out from my bedroom window and see Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive transformed into nothing but drifts of snow and abandoned vehicles.

So, yeah, sure, call us snowflakes. Have at it. But just watch out, because, you never know, all our discontent over a half-assed presidential pick may just turn us into a blizzard.

Snowstorm in the City — Image by © Jose Luis Pelaez, Inc./Corbis