In summer it is hot and in winter it is cold. Sometimes more, sometimes less. And it wouldn't have to be news beyond a few days of extreme cold or heat. The real bombshell news would be snow in August or tropical nights around Christmas, in the northern hemisphere, of course.
But with each passing year, the prolonged climate anomalies that afflict our planet increase and become news, sometimes far-fetched, although, yes, in both hemispheres. So much so that they are on the way to changing our habits, our diet, and even our clothing or vacation spot. The thermostat set all year round at that comfortable and recommended 21 degrees is now a thing of the past, since we are already told to keep it at 27º in summer, 19º in winter.
As much as the more than evident ravages of global warming affect us all, there are still legions of naysayers to whom it seems perfectly normal to suffer endless summer nights in which the thermometer does not drop below 30 degrees, enormous and uncontrollable forest fires, the progressive rise in sea level, droughts and floods everywhere, seas and oceans wrapped in plastic, the disappearance of glaciers or the accelerated melting of the poles.
But whether or not we are believers, catastrophists, or naysayers, the truth is that we are all like that frog that slowly dies in a pot in which it is cooked in a bain-marie, which of course can be interpreted as a sweet and even longed-for death. , since the naive frog fades away without realizing it, without even trying to jump to save its life.
The Koreans have another version. Two frogs stay afloat for a long time in a large bowl of milk into which they have fallen and from which they cannot find a way to escape, until one of them, exhausted, stops kicking and drowns. The other, also exhausted, nevertheless continues shaking her legs until, oh miracle, the milk turns into butter, which is what allows her to take the leap that will save her life.
The question we face boils down to which of the two frogs in the Korean story we want to be, or whether, as is happening, we allow ourselves to slowly succumb like the frog that is cooked in a bain-marie. Starting with our rulers, not everyone is clear about it.
Now, who to believe in? It's been a long time and if ever throughout history, we can in no way trust the information that comes to us from infinite sources, many of them interested, crooked, exaggerated, mendacious. And this excess of unverified information leaves us not only so alone and defenseless in the face of danger - a danger so real that we feel it daily in our own flesh - but paralyzed, unable to distinguish truth from lies, lies from lies. TRUE. That is to say, our democracy, which has cost so much to achieve and which appeared to be about majorities, is at the mercy of minorities who are on their way to turning lies into our daily bread.
We are paying dearly for the massive abandonment of the countryside. Cities are reeling from so many challenges with no consensual solution in sight. Justice, perhaps our only resource before dying happily cooked in a bain-marie, is the door to Kafka's castle that we will never cross.
The years, the catastrophes, the crises pass, without us learning anything, without us drawing even a single lesson that could save us from this regrettable and devilish existential crossroads of our own collective invention. Mange gladly doesn't sting and what the hell do we care about the fate of a frog whose life is slowly extinguished in a bain-marie.
