Those Who Don’t Take Heed Die of Ingratitude
One evening, while in college, I attended an extracurricular lecture held by my college adviser on nuclear proliferation. It was a concern that was close to his heart and I admired his “doing something about it” at the time.
During his talk, he shared the parable of “the frog in boiling water” and it was the first time I had heard it told.
Essentially, it boiled (pun intended) down to this:
If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out to save its life. However, if you place the frog into a pot of room temperature water and slowly heat it to a boil, the frog will gradually boil to death.
The lesson from the story?
For me, it was this:
Inattention and complacency kills; gradually by degree at first, and then all once.
I believe this applies to people on a personal basis as well as on a grander scale. Consider how much we have progressed since Y2K. After 911, I became that frog in the water before I jumped out and went Galt ten years later, in 2011. It was around the time the tsunamis struck Japan and a few months before Ann Barnhardt jumped ship. I couldn’t stop the boiling all around me, so I got out.
For the next several years though, a sort of paralysis set in that was brought about by my anger and fear. In a sense, I was boiling still, but in a different way; from the inside out, as it were, as I’ve seen others do also. Earlier this year, I wrote about some of that in another essay, regarding the importance of honesty and how I leaped from that latest boiling pot:
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