IDIOM: " Chickens Come Home to Roost"

Definition - used of person's past actions that are causing him or her to experience problems in the present The sense of roost employed here (“to settle down for rest or sleep”) is not now one of the more common ones. Chickens do, in fact, come home to roost, as do most people. As to Mr. Troup’s complaint of “contemptuous and disrespectful language,” it reminds us of the remark, that “curses are like chickens; they come home to roost.” — Louisville Public Advertiser (Louisville, KY), 12 oct. 1825 This idiomatic expression was employed by Malcolm X: "Malcolm X stirred up a hornet's nest when he said this about John F. Kennedy after the (U.S.) president was assassinated, possibly alluding to the alleged C.I.A. attempts on Fidel Castro's life. But the saying is an old one, dating back to at least 1810 in the form of 'Curses are like young chickens; they always come home to roost,' which appears to have been the invention of English poet laureate Robert Southey as the motto of his poem 'The Curse of Kehama.' The idea, of course, is that every curse or evil act returns to its originator as chickens return to their roost at night." From "The Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997). This speech is sometimes called "The Chickens Come Home To Roost," because of an answer Malcolm X gave in response to a question following the speech. The question concerned the late President John Kennedy. It was Malcolm X's answer, that the Presidents death was a case of "chickens coming home to roost" -- that the violence that Kennedy had failed to stop had come back to him, this resulted in the Elijah Muhammad silencing him. Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam a short time later.It is important to note that this speech was delivered before Malcolm left the Nation of Islam and accepted true Islam -- so his views in this speech do not reflect his own or those he held near the end of his life. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that as it was the evil sin of slavery that caused the downfall and destruction of ancient Egypt and Babylon, and of ancient Greece, as well as ancient Rome, so it was the evil sin of colonialism (slavery, nineteenth-century European style) that caused the collapse of the white nations in present-day Europe as world powers. Unbiased scholars and unbiased observers agree that the wealth and power of white Europe has rapidly declined during the nineteen-year period between World War II and today.