TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

You’ve probably heard the boiling frog theory. It goes like this: If a frog is dropped into a pot of tepid water that is slowly heated, the creature won’t perceive the danger until it’s too late — when the water is finally boiling, and it’s cooked to death. But if a frog is dropped directly into boiling water, it will jump out immediately, saving itself.

I don’t need to tell you that in this analogy, we’re the frog. We’re in hot water that keeps getting hotter. So why aren’t more of us jumping? Why are we slow to react? This analogy suggests that it’s because the water didn’t start out boiling. We’ve been slowly acclimating to the increase in temperature — or rather, the increase in danger.

Though, to be fair, temperature isn’t just a metaphor here, it’s literal. One of the dangers that we’ve been relatively slow to react to is climate change. The planet is heating up, albeit slowly, but surely. And some of us are unwittingly swimming, enjoying the warm water, while others sound the alarm.

In the analogy, the frog is in denial. In real life, we’re in hot water together and not acting fast enough, so what we’re facing is collective denial.

Whether it’s about climate change, or the pandemic, or authoritarianism, or mass shootings, or human rights violations, we sometimes don’t see what we don’t want to see. And sometimes we don’t see dangers because they’re hidden, minimized, or flat-out erased.

Or, as we’ve seen in our current administration, inconvenient facts are removed from websites, names redacted from files, research halted and buried. It is difficult to know when to jump out of the pot when we don’t have a thermometer. When we don’t have access to the facts.

When we go right back to business as usual after yet another school shooting, or after another nonviolent American citizen is killed by masked ICE agents, we’re at risk of being desensitized. The danger is that, as the water begins to boil around us, we regard the temperature gradually rising with a sense of resignation — “this is just the way it is now” — rather than immediate action.

The danger is that we want to believe it can’t happen here, or it can’t happen again, or it can’t happen to people I know and love, or it can’t happen to me.

It can, as today’s poem reminds us.

The Problem with Early Warnings
by Charles Rafferty

People don’t like to leave a party
unless the house is actually 
on fire. Even then, if the flames 
are far enough away 
to be pretty, they’ll finish
their drink, take one more pass
at the hors d’oeuvres.
How things happen has always been 
unclear. Hurricanes begin
in a place where no one lives.
Agents of the government start
to wear masks. Fascism  is
a word my neighbors won’t use
yet. They are following 
the law, they say, and the sirens
are coming for someone else.

“The Problem with Early Warnings” by Charles Rafferty. Originally published in The Southern Review. Used by permission of the poet.