So, What's This I Hear About Snowflakes?

“An overly sensitive person, incapable of dealing with any opinions that differ from their own. These people can often be seen congregating in ‘safe zones’ on college campuses.” 

Thus saith the Urban Dictionary, perhaps summarizing this new idiom bandied about by mostly conservative pundits. 

I find the comparison, actually, rather inept, because what is snowflake, literally? 

Wikepedia gives you the answer: 

A snowflake is either a single ice crystal or an aggregation of ice crystals which falls through the Earth's atmosphere as snow. Each flake nucleates around a dust particle in supersaturated air masses by attracting supercooled cloud water droplets, which freeze and accrete in crystal form. Complex shapes emerge as the flake moves through differing temperature and humidity zones in the atmosphere, such that individual snowflakes differ in detail from one another, but may be categorized in eight broad classifications and at least 80 individual variants. 

What I am getting from this definition is strength and diversity. In fact, no two snowflakes actually look alike (like people, even twins). Perhaps the fear of diversity could perhaps be read into the pundits’ use of the word here, but, as the definition above states, a snowflake or a group of snowflakes are originally ice crystal. Yes, the original ice melts, but its impact as snow can be quite powerful: 

Once snowflakes land and accumulate, they undergo metamorphosis with changes in temperature and coalesce into a snowpack. The characteristics of the snowpack reflect the changed nature of the constituent snow crystals. 
 

Yes, get a bunch of snowflakes together, and watch out. The resulting impact, morphing the sarcastic words of Ida in Mildred Pierce when she pointedly refers to Mildred’s gigolo boyfriend/husband/stepfather and lover of the spoiled Veda (eerily like the winner of the election in his narcissism and amorality): Don't look now, Junior, but you're standing next to a falling snowpack. 
 

I wish the retro Chicagoland figure Suzy Snowflake could, like Glinda threatens to do to the Wicked Witch of the West, just say begone, lest someone drop a house on you, to the forces of evil that are taking over this land. 
 

In fact, at this juncture, it’s small comfort to lapse into the cliché that after winter comes spring, which would not occur without the healing, cleansing darkness and beauty (just look at snowflakes close-up) of winter. 

I do think, though, that snowflakes like me who really believe in truth and beauty, if not causing a violent avalanche, can work behind the scenes, like the seed in the ground growing secretly, to overcome the evil so that we don’t face a silent spring where no birds sing.