We Are All Frogs - Nov 7 2020

 

We Are All Frogs

Nov 7 2020

We are all frogs,

and the water

is slowly heating up.

But this comes naturally to us,

the sense that things will always be as they are

and always have.

If only

we learned more about the past.

If only

we questioned what's happening,

challenged ourselves

to imagine even better.

Trouble is, I tend to be complacent

even cowardly.

I get too comfortable,

good

at the small incremental adjustments

that eventually add up,

first to compromise, then detachment

then the complicity of silence,

holding my tongue

head down.

Until it's too damned hot

and we're all boiled alive.

But the metaphor is false,

because frogs are too sensible

to tarry long,

hopping out of the beaker, and out of the lab,

to a choice lily pad

in some stagnant pond.

Eyes blinking sleepily

and lounging in the sun,

flicking long sticky tongues

at passing flies.

The bourgeois life of a frog

a man can only envy.

The unthinking luxury

of living in the now,

the perennial present

in a pleasant little pond

in a summer without end,

no need to remember

and nothing to forget.

This is the momentous day Joe Biden was officially declared President-elect. At the time of this writing, what happens in the next turbulent 70 or so days with Donald Trump a lame duck but still dangerous, not to mention an unpredictable Electoral College, remains to be seen.

But after 4 years in which the democracy we took for granted revealed its fragility, this idea of how easily we accommodate ourselves to slow change and “new normals” has been amply illustrated: when, instead of outrage and condemnation, his of litany of corruption, criminality, bullying, lying, and previously unthinkable flouting of convention were so soon eliciting mere yawns and shoulder shrugs -- “just Donald being Donald ... more of the same ... ho-hum”. How we so quickly forgot yesterday's latest eruption as we were all abuzz with today's, until the overwhelming weight of his transgressions left us numb.

And the fact that so many still deny climate change and that action has been so insubstantial, even when its devastating effects are becoming evident in daily life, is evidence of more of the same.

So we are all frogs in boiling water, pleasantly oblivious to imminent danger. We forget the lessons of history; that is, if we ever even learned them. We are complacent about how things are, as if they were always this way. Because the truth is, at least in terms of climate, the tiny window of time in which our species has ascended and our civilization flourished is the exception, not the rule. In a climate system of tipping points and positive feedback loops, things stay the same ...until they suddenly don't.

But as I recall I once heard, this experiment never happened and frogs don't behave this way.

As well, there is much to be said for bourgeois values, even though it's fashionable among the intelligentsia to denigrate them. Because it's the extremists and the self-righteous and the utterly convicted who are the most dangerous; while the rest of us, who take refuge in the small dailiness of life – tending our gardens, enjoying the small domestic pleasures of family and friends – are the bedrock of social order and civility. The key, of course, is to still pay attention. I'm not sure the frog in the final stanza is. But then, animals have the great luxury of living in the now. We don't.