“O, hypocrites, you can discern the face of the sky; but can you not discern the signs of the times?” Matthew 16:3
**********
Reading is dangerous. It exhumes thoughts, disturbing thoughts, thoughts that poke us, voices that whisper, images of smiling frogs being boiled, signs that expose culture’s addictive character. Can we change our way of thinking?
Thinking’s hard work, changing directions is even harder. My daddy was laconic, prone to brevity but pretty good with homespun wisdom. He could read the signs of the times as good as any gypsy.
“Now son, whenever you get into hot water, get out quick,” he’d say, reminding me of Stanislaw J. Lec’s aphorism: “I prefer the sign that says ‘No Entry’ to the one that says ‘No Exit.’”
Now I’ve never boiled a frog before, but others have. You know the notion. Put a frog into a pot of tepid water, increase the heat slowly and the frog will be boiled without even knowing it. It seems heartless to subject hapless amphibians to such extreme experiments.
Still, many experiments and studies continue to validate or to dispute the verity of this thesis. They’re equally contradictory. The only absolute is that the game is rigged against the frog. Slow scalding has a zero-sum outcome.
The only consensus that surfaces is if the frog has a way out, he’ll take it. But if not, what’s the significance of these experiments? Since there’s no recorded incident of a frog being resurrected, the experiments have been synthesized philosophically into a universally adaptive metaphor.
It has entered the lexicon as the ‘boiled frog’ hypothesis. The metaphor joins other warning signs, like the camel’s nose in the tent, give an inch and they’ll take a mile and slippery slope. It’s a favorite of writers, politicians and preachers who are prone to pompous grandiloquence to avoid entrapment and get out of hot water.
As a warning sign it explains the concept of ‘creeping normality, ’a type of amnesia where unnoticeable increments of change happen slowly while culture lures us in, bit by bit. Death by a thousand cuts. We smile all the way to the end.
Let’s pretend that the pot is the world and culture is the warm water in it. Then play like the fire under it represents change. Finally, let’s pretend we’re all frogs.
We slide off into the water nice and easy. Yeah, it’s a bit cool at first, but we get used to it. Now let’s keep turning up the heat, little by little. We never notice we’re being boiled. Such is the addictive nature of culture.
I’m at Starbuck’s, part of the ‘convenience culture’ that loves of all things drive-thru. A machine with a human voice takes my order and I queue up, number three in line.
From the lead car a hand emerges holding a cell phone. Another hand from the window holding a scanning device meets it. An instantaneous debit/credit transaction is conceived somewhere in the ether. Amazing.
The next car hands off a debit card and, like the other, another transaction’s born. It’s my turn.
The young clerk at the window has a large silver nose ring and green-ink bird designs on her forearm. What are these signs saying?
“Do you take checks?” I ask, playing with her mind.
“You kidding? This is drive-thru.” she snaps. I drop it.
I hand her a $5 bill. She studies the face of Lincoln and looks at me as if to say, “What’s this?”
I ask her what was with the cell and scanner in the previous car. “Where you been, mister? I scanned an app. Quick, easy, no hassle. Instant money. It’s a sign of the times. Get with it, trash that Blackberry, quit using cash. It’s so yesterday; plus, money’s dirty.”
“Dirty?’ Listen, there’s a looming Star Wars in the sky between America, China and Russia. What good’s your app when GPS is vaporized by killer satellites and the electrical grid goes dark? No ATM, no gas, no food, no cell. You’ll kiss Abe and Ben on the lips then, dirty or not.” I tell her she’s a boiling frog but doesn’t know it.
“Whatever,” she says and shrugs.
“Keep the change, you might need it.” She understands this.
Signs are everywhere. The ‘screen generation,’ pain clinics, technology, environmental, marijuana farms, you name it. Where’s it all leading? Is it too late to pluck the frog from the boiling caldron? Your guess is as good as mine.
But one thing I’m sure of: Only a fool will test the temperature of culture’s water with both feet.
Bud Hearn
May 21, 2019