The Boiling Frog Syndrome

Our Fate?

If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.

Version of the story from Daniel Quinn‘s The Story of B

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One of the advantages of having reached a certain age is that, if your memory is still working, you can remember how things used to be and you can see how they have changed over the years and decades.

One of the disadvantages of having reached a certain age is that, if your memory is still working, you can remember how things used to be and you can see how they have changed over the years and decades.

As a Baby Boomer born in 1952, I have vivid memories of growing up in Los Angeles, California in a Cold War world where air-raid sirens and bombs shelters, the “Communist Menace” and foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing rhetoric from the John Birch Society and their ilk, overt and subtle forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia, were all part of the socio-political landscape.

Initially, in the aftermath of World War II, there was a widespread sense of trust throughout society. The government was our friend, while authority figures were always male and were never to be challenged or questioned. The widespread trust was, to a very large extent, the product of innocence and naiveté.

Oh, sure, there were some dark clouds on the horizon: the “dirty tricks” of Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon was the precursor to all the “dirty tricks” political campaigns of the last 60 years when he engaged in his early congressional campaigns against Jerry Voorhis in 1948 and Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, labeling both of them “soft on Communism” and exploiting the ignorant public’s fear of communism, a fear fomented by Winston Churchill in his 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, decrying what he called “the Iron Curtain.” Nixon and his close friend, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, were…