The American Frog

cropped with SnipSnip

I really don't know how I came around to thinking about The Inconvenient Truth but I definitely enjoyed it, especially the part about the frog (shown below). So this inspired me to write about the nature of Americans' abilities to respond to conflict.

As shown in the video, the frog doesn’t move until there is an evident danger. Why is that? Why can’t it sense the coming of danger and hop out while it still can? Why is it dependent on an outside force to save it?

The frog has a procrastinating nature which causes it to delay action until it is absolutely necessary. Americans are procrastinators. We wait until we need to do something before we do it, or until someone tells us to do it.

Why do we do this? Because in the back of our minds we always tell ourselves, “There is plenty of time to do that later, it’s ok we’ll get to that in just a tiny bit”. More often than not we really don’t have that much time, but we keep telling ourselves that until it is painfully obvious that we’ve run out of time.

A situation like this has played out on a more national level in America. Americans did not read the signs of the coming economic decline and told themselves "It's ok, we have more pressing issues at the moments, we'll get around to that in just a bit". However we kept saying that until it became the most pressing issue and the nation spiraled into seemingly irreparable debt. Now that we've finally become aware of the severity of the situation we are scrambling for a way to get out. But why couldn't we have taken care of this while it was still a smaller problem? It's because of our lack of awareness and our incredible procrastination.