How to Boil a Frog

Or should I say how to boil a Freedom Amphibian?

As always, the latest article from The Consortium is definitely worth a read. It may preaching to the choir, for most people who read this blog. But it's extremely well-written and hopefully it will be one more dose of motivation to get us outraged enough to come together and make change. Towards the end there was a paragraph that summed it up best (but you really should read the entire article anyway):

If the American people don’t demand accountability for the lies that led to war, a new political paradigm may be created. Bush may conclude that he is free to make any life-or-death decision and then unleash his conservative allies to manipulate the facts and intimidate the opposition. By inaction, the American people may be sleepwalking down a path that takes them into a land controlled by lies, delusion and fear.

Two weekends ago I did a phone interview for moveon.org. They paired me with a complete stranger. We were given ten or so questions to ask each other and then reported our results to moveon. In the 90 minutes we were talking, this guy (who is far more left-leaning than I am) also summed things up well. He said if you want to boil a frog, you slowly turn up the heat, from room temperature to boiling and the frog won't feel the rising temperature. But if you drop him in boiling water from the start, he'll hop right out. Hopefully, you are brighter than I was two weeks ago and don't need this metaphor explained any further. I feel the heat rising in this country, as does everyone else in my social circles. What about the rest of the country. Will enough people feel the heat before it's too late?

The Civil Rights Movement keeps coming to mind. Will it come to that? I wasn't alive back then, I'm as white as they get, and I come from a pretty sheltered background. So perhaps it's insulting to suggest whatever beefs I have about the Bush Regime are on the same page as slavery and the century of Jim Crow that followed. But what will it take for change to occur? I heard a story on my drive home from work today about the 50th Anniversary of the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott (and if you're like me, you probably never knew Baton Rouge inspired the Montgomery bus boycott). It's a pretty inspirational story. African-Americans who had cars gave free rides (to and from work) for those who didn't have cars during the boycott.

But what struck me was the quote from a boycotter who said, "When we started we didn't start to end segregation on buses. We just started to get seats." Of course their protest had a huge domino effect, even if that was not its initial ambition. So what is on our horizon? Is Election Day 2004 our only hope for change? Or can a more effective domino fall between now and then? It's time to look to our recent past for inspiration! How much hotter does it have to get?