A Recipe for Frog Soup
And some quick thoughts on that disastrous debate.
Back in August of 2020, Psychology Today was writing about “pandemic fatigue” hahaha they had no idea, grasping for scientific straws that might explain why so many of us were less and less interested in impotent rituals like mask wearing, hand washing, and social distancing. (One of the magazine’s suggestions—and I am not making this up—was to make a feelings chart. I checked it out, and I feel like you’re a bunch of pathological liars and I would feel better if you would stick your poison shots, your vaccine passports, and your New World Order up your arse weren’t listed among the options, so that thing was basically useless.) The purpose of the Psychology Today piece, and the countless others like it, was to increase compliance through strategic empathy.
“We know, you’re tired of muzzling your face with that disgusting scrap of fabric. We are too! It’s miserable. It’s awful. Girllllllll, maskne is a thing. But this isn’t about how we might feel in this fleeting moment. This is about protecting not only the peeps we love but vulnerable strangers on the sidewalk! It won’t be forever. Look, at the end of the day, all I want to do is to rip my bra from my body. But if I knew my boulder holder would keep other people safe, I’d sleep in that thing, and I know you would, too. We’re all in this together!”
I’m not even sure if I was aware of the phrase “boiling the frog” before the pandemic. I certainly cannot recall using it. But its applicability to all things COVID was undeniable. (If you’re unfamiliar, simply put, BTF is a metaphor for the idea that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, he’ll almost surely jump right out. But if you put him in a nice cool bath and then slowly heat it up, he won’t notice until it’s too late, and then you’ll have yourself a delicious pot of frog soup.) This is what BTF looks like in the most basic pandemic terms:
When I stop to think of all of the ways we (all of us, everywhere) are being boiled right now, I start to get existence fatigue. Like, life was hard enough when I was merely trying to be a good mom and a not-too-annoying an attentive wife and a prolific writer and a productive member of society. Now I’ve got to do all of that plus comparison shop for generators, memorize the many medicinal benefits of apple cider vinegar, practice running uphill with a backpack filled with concrete, teach myself how to build a water catcher and sew my own clothes, plant a garden, raise some chickens, and learn how to preserve asparagus. Sometimes it’s too much. The water is so toasty, and I’m so, so tired, maybe I’ll just close my eyes for a quick sec…
To be clear, I haven’t given up (and I won’t as long as I have a pulse), but you have to admit it’s exhausting. It’s not just our melting rights to bodily autonomy and scientific truth warming the waters, or even little things like the right to pay cash for goods and services, an option that’s growingly increasingly rare. There’s nary an aspect of modern-day life that isn’t slowly but undeniably becoming unrecognizable to folks who once took things like freedom, privacy, and safety for granted.
SURVEILLANCE
I grew up in the age of Columbo and Charlie’s Angels, which meant every once in a while I’d have a dream where someone wiretapped my pink rotary phone and discovered I had a huge crush on Michael Chiumento and then announced it to the whole school. This was the most extreme example of spying my innocent mind could even conjure. Today we’ve got Alexas in every room, 5G towers on every corner, GPS trackers on our wrists, and our cell phones are spying on us 24/7. Social media platforms and search engines track our posts, photos, purchases, clicks, likes, locations, and interactions. Even our vacuums are in on it, scoping out our houses and sending photos back to the home office for analysis. And most of us are like, “Meh, whaddayagonnado? If my Roomba really wants a photo of my ankles while I’m on the throne, what do I care?” It’s just to unlock my phone. It’s just to get on the plane. It’s just to verify you work here. It’s just so we can check to make sure your social credit standing is solid enough for you to purchase that bag of beans. We don’t just allow surveillance anymore, we invite it. And once Digital IDs are a thing, there’s no going back.
OPEN BORDERS
The slide from “welcome to America, here’s how the naturalization process works” to “here’s your cash card and your cell phone, no need to pay taxes and please try not to murder anyone while you’re here, thanks” was fast and furious.
From a post I wrote on the subject way back in January:
The virtue-signaling left has turned America’s welcome mat into a floodgate for violent criminals and bloodthirsty gangs. We hand these strangers benefits and amenities that countless struggling Americans can only dream of. Why though? As if that’s not enough, our current Veep and possible future POTUS [drops to knees, please no] has said she supports dramatically cutting ICE funding and providing gender transition surgery for illegal detainees.
Conservatives often speculate that mass, unchecked immigration is about packing voter rolls, but the reality is most of the folks flooding into the country are never going to cast a single vote. Ask yourself: Why, then, would anyone want to make their own nation or neighborhood less safe? Who would that benefit?
Replacement theory isn’t a conspiracy or a racist, right-wing delusion; it’s happening. And the party that’s pushing it does so under the cozy, feel-good blanket of social justice and human rights. Does anyone actually think Kamala Harris cares deeply about caravans full of Venezuelan criminals? Seriously? Asking for a friend.
GLOBAL WARMING CLIMATE CHANGE
For a while there, if you just switched from aerosol hairspray to the annoying pump kind, picked paper-over-plastic at the market, and didn’t throw your gum wrappers out the car window, you were a decent human doing your part to protect the planet. Today you’re an asshole if you have a gas stove or an SUV. (You’re going straight to hell if you have both.) If the globalists get their way, in a few short years we’ll be cooking bug burgers *that we walked fifteen minutes or less to procure* on our government-subsidized electric ranges wearing one of our three allotted annual articles of clothing. Is it getting warm in here or is it just me?
GAY LGBTQ RIGHTS
We’ve gone from “love who you love” and “same-sex marriage should come with the same rights and benefits as straight marriage” (two things I wholeheartedly support, BTW) to having to recognize 107 different genders—a list that is “subject to change at any time,” of course—and “an infinite number of” sexual identities. (You literally cannot even say “gay rights” anymore, as it will offend at least 106 other identities.) Our kids are forced to brave Drag Queen Story Hours and naked pride parades and the injection of gender identity into school curriculums as early as kindergarten. When did parents lose the fundamental right to teach their own children about human sexuality? Why does a second grader need to know how her teacher chooses to describe her carnal cravings? Why are we even having this conversation? [*leaves desk to get cold compress for forehead*]
AUTOMATION
There was a time as a kid when I thought cashier wouldn’t be a bad career choice. That satisfying beep every time you scanned an item; the opportunity to pack neat, perfectly balanced bags; a paid fifteen-minute break every four hours; what was there not to love? Of course, cashiers are going the way of the abacus—along with bank tellers, assembly line workers, phone operators, travel agents, bookkeepers, truck drivers, and receptionists. Why pay a person to sit behind a desk and greet customers or patients when a nice iPad will do the job? Thanks to AI, musicians, artists, and writers like me could soon be memory holed. But efficiency! Economy! Scalability! [*checks self for signs of heatstroke]
It’s not my nature to be a downer, but I have to admit the sweeping slow boil can be a bit depressing. I’m honestly not sure what to do about it, besides a) be aware of it, and b) fight it every chance I can get. So I wait in the longer line to be rung up by a human being rather than scream through self check-out. I keep plugging away at my craft, confident that ChatGPT cannot do what I do—at least, not yet. I go Karen and ask to speak to a manager when I’m told, “oh, we don’t accept cash” and leave the store empty-handed if I’m refused. I vote with my head and not my heart. And I count my blessings, because I have so, so many, and because it’s a fact that gratitude is one of the most profound predictors of happiness. What are you doing to combat existence fatigue? Tell me in the comments. ;)
P.S. I know all anyone probably wants to talk about today is last night’s flaming train wreck of a debate, but I don’t have all that much to say. I did not expect it, I certainly did not enjoy it, but I will admit it: she mopped the floor with him. Yes, she lied repeatedly, and yes, the moderators were clearly on her side. But seeing the pair spar felt like watching some twisted, political Parent Trap remake. She was cool and articulate (or was she? see below) and he was flustered and defensive. She came out swinging; he couldn’t stop stumbling. From “they’re eating the pets” to “I have concepts of a plan,” the cringe was off the charts. Obviously one skillful debate does not a president make; I just hope the swing state voters who watched last night realize that.
FWIW, Jeff Childers, whom I admire greatly, felt like Trump did a bang-up job, all things considered. And also there’s this.
P.P.S. On the twenty-third anniversary of the day we attacked our own country to further the globalist agenda, my thoughts and prayers are with the victims’ families and the brave first responders who risked life and limb that tragic day. #NeverForgetIndeed
Last month my husband and I closed on a 40-acre ranch in a rural area of NE Arizona. We’ve been up there every weekend since then getting the ranch ready for our permanent move next month. Besides having the benefit of being off-grid, with a high producing well, the thing we ended up living the most about our time up there is that we are disconnected. Our cellphones rarely have a connection. We have no internet. It’s just the two of us, our four dogs and nature. My husband and I have chatted and laughed together more in the last month than we have in the last year. Doing hard physical work together in the sunshine all day, working for ourselves, with many “uhoh’s” and “aw heck’s” then settling down on the front porch for dinner is just what we needed. My new mantra is going to be,
“Get Disconnected, Get “CONNECTED”.
Jenna, thank you for this. My 16 year old son is returning to in-person high school 11th grade. We had him in a remote learning school since Covid because we live in tyrannical MN and did not want him masked, vaccinated or woke cultured. His older siblings are in college and encouraged him to return in person for social benefits. We support him. After 2 weeks, his observations of his peers are fascinating. He is like a case study of what happens when you remove a healthy functional teenager and place them in our current MN public high school. “Mom, the kids cannot have a conversation. They cannot hold eye contact. They cannot put their phone downs.” I will stop there. I think his journey back into high school is more fascinating than when he left middle school hook during Covid(which was a trip of exhaustion). Had to share!