By JB Baylon

I’ve always been fascinated by this tale I’ve long heard about a frog in the pot.

It says that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water it will immediately jump out in an attempt to save itself.

But if you put a frog in a pot of tepid water and slowly bring that pot to a boil, the frog will be cooked long before it realizes it has to get out of there to save itself.

I’ve never tried this experiment. Not only do I not have the cooking facility required at home, I also don’t have any idea where to find frogs.

And I do not have the stomach to do so either.

But if this tale is true then it makes me wonder - what are our life situations similar to the situation facing the second frog? In what way are we in a pot that is slowly coming to a boil with all of us totally unaware of what is happening?

I also cannot escape comparing the second frog to the United States of the 21st Century as it exists in a new global order that is the second pot. The end of the Cold War, the advent of new technology including robotics and the creation of a new trade regime made necessary by globalization has resulted in a world where the America of the 1950s, 1960s and even 1980s no longer fits. This is complicated by the reality that internally, the conservative White Anglo Saxon and Protestant America that trembled with the election of Catholic Kennedy and the institution of civil rights in the 1960s is now fading away with the emergence of a more multi-cultural America.

Against these changes has emerged a regressive wave, one that seeks to slow the cultural and social diversity within American society while trying to revive the brick and mortar industries of the smokestack era. In the wake of this wave, POTUS#45 was elected and has now begun taking steps to “make America great again” on its own steam and the rest of the world be damned.

But because America in 2017 is no longer the engine of the global economy that it was maybe up to the 1980s, this inward focus may in fact only hasten bringing the pot to a boil. In a world where, for example,

Australia is more dependent on China for trade than on any other country, America’s ability to throw its weight around is greatly diminished. And it’s leader’s ability to do so is greatly curtailed if his public demands the inward focus, demands that he clean up the inner cities first before he cleanses the streets of some far-away capital, and opposes the shedding of American blood on the sidewalks of the Middle or Near East when too much blood is being shed on the sidewalks of America.

There are too many contradictions pulling within America at the moment, and a leader inexperienced in the art of statecraft at the global stage while thinking he could treat US lawmakers and US media the way he treats his Board of Directors may just be what the Doctor ordered -- if that doctor were someone like Russia’s Putin or North Korea’s Kim.

Indeed America’s enemies may just choose to do nothing much for the next four years, simply standing idly by as the frog in the pot slowly boils to its death.

***

Today January 30 my mother would have been turning 82, but we stopped celebrating her earthly birthdays 24 years ago.

In 1993 she died on my father’s 61st birthday, March 18. And my father in turn passed away (last year) on my birthday, September 25.

If you see some pattern to this you’ll know why I am now staying in an underground bunker the whole day today and only emerging as soon as the clock strikes 00:01 on January 31!

But whatever Fate may hold for me, today I celebrate my mother’s birth with a prayer of thanks for her and for all mothers like her who spent their lives to raising their kids to the best of their abilities with total dedication and sans much fanfare -- while humming “The Sun will come out tomorrow...”!