Frogs in pots

You know the cautionary story of the frog in a pot of water, right? It was old when I was in first grade, and I was in first grade when Methuselah was cutting teeth. The tale goes like this:

Put a frog into a pot of boiling water and immediately you have frog soup. But, put a frog in a pot of cold water, slowly turn up the heat and the frog adapts ... he/she/it adapts all the way up to the frog soup stage, by which time it's too late for it to opt out of the cautionary tale.

We're all in a pot of cold water right now. On January 20th the soup maker will step up to the stove and set the element under our pot to simmer. For the purpose of this analogy I'm using an electric stove. I hate electric stoves. They take too long to heat up and too long to cool down. As a cook, you relinquish too much control ... which, happily, adds a new level to the analogy I'm trying to shoehorn in here.

The changes that will happen over the next four years will be slow to take effect but difficult to reverse. There's a great risk of our adapting to the changes as they slowly take effect. That is so for a couple of reasons: One, we probably won't be personally and immediately affected at first. 'Huh, this is no big deal,' we'll think and go on about our business; Two, we're in a deep pot. The chances of escape for most of us are nil. Everything we know and love is in that pot with us ... our work, our savings, our Social Security, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, friends, our homes, the beautiful land. We can't just tear ourselves away.  And so we'll stay and we'll adapt.

We do have one advantage over the frogs, however. We know what's coming.We can't adapt, we won't adapt. That is the key concept: Do not adapt. We have to join with our fellow frogs and devise ways to reclaim control of the stove. Failing that, we must work every day to stymie the soup maker. We have to make his tenure as Executive Chef a living hell. We have to annoy him and his entire staff (congress, etc.) ceaselessly. Annoy them with phone calls, emails, letters. Annoy them by loudly and publicly calling out their bullshit.

It won't be hard to get under the Chef's skin, It's so thin. We can drive him crazier than he is by pointing out his many deficiencies publicly. It works. Ask Alec Baldwin. But pressure must be applied uniformly to all those associated with him. Pence, Ryan, Yurtle the Turtle, and the rest are thicker skinned, craftier, smarter.

Write to your congressman or congresswoman. Be nasty but accurate. Use facts not innuendo. Refrain from ad hominem attacks (I hereby repent of the Yurtle the Turtle reference above).

The time for being nice and polite has passed. They're not, why should we be?  

PS: This is the last post involving animal analogies, I promise.