Everyone knows the popular myth about frogs and boiling water:  If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it senses the danger and gets itself out of there pronto; if you put a frog into cool water and slowly raise the heat, the frog will allow itself to be boiled to death because the slow change does not seem alarming.  Fortunately, this is indeed a myth.  Frogs are smarter than you think and will jump out of that water as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm.  In fact, in some ways frogs are smarter than humans.  They don’t sit there ruminating on the increasing temperature, rationalizing that they just have to accept it.  (No, this is not an essay about climate change.)  We humans run the risk of metaphorically letting ourselves get boiled to death because it seems mentally easier to normalize a slow change than it is to push back.

I wrote about Normalization before, mostly ranting about how Big Food has normalized really unhealthy eating habits, to the detriment of us all.  I’ve been thinking about Normalization again as we move into our third year of this pandemic and watch as the Omicron variant wave sloshes over us.  I have been as guilty as anyone else of normalizing the impact of this virus by saying, “Well, the data indicate that Omicron is less vicious than the previous variants so there will probably be fewer serious cases and deaths.”  I am also as COVID-weary as anyone else, even though this pandemic has not been a severe financial or even mental strain on my life (sometimes it’s good to be an introvert who likes to shut in at home).  It’s like we think it’s ok that “just” 1500 people a day are dying from complications of COVID.  How did we get here?  I remember at the beginning of this whole thing, people throwing around the number of the 12,000 people who died from Swine Flu in 2009 as a number so horrific that we couldn’t even contemplate that happening again.  We pass that in less than 10 days, now.  And barely blink an eye.

I started keeping a more rigorous “COVID journal” a couple of months into this pandemic and captured daily numbers of infections and then deaths.  Levels that horrified me 18 months ago would give me comfort today (“It’s getting better!”).  I remember an interview with an infectious disease physician maybe a year ago.  The interviewer asked, “We typically lose 20-40,000 people a year in this country to seasonal flu.  Should we be ok with that?”  The doctor responded, “No!  We shouldn’t be ok with that!  It doesn’t need to happen!”  Nor should we be ok with losing approximately 650,000 people a year to heart disease, or 600,000 to cancer.  But we kind of are.  Certainly not every death is preventable, but we all know many of us engage in socially normalized behavior that helps to push that number up.  We are sad when someone we know dies from a preventable cause that they chose to not control, yet we sue when someone dies from a negligent action by another.  Why don’t we hold ourselves to the same account to which we hold other people?

I’m not trying to depress you.  I’m asking a serious sociological question: why do we allow ourselves to normalize behaviors in ourselves and others that lead to negative outcomes?  For me, it comes back to Thermodynamics:  It takes energy to resist the expansion of chaos.  And I don’t have infinite energy, so I have to pick and choose when to fight.  I am also in a fairly privileged position of being way up at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  I don’t need to worry about my basic physiological needs (food, water, shelter) or my basic safety (I live in a low crime suburb and am financially secure).  I am surrounded by love from my family, friends, neighbors.  Continuing to work our way up the hierarchy, I constantly work on the self-esteem part and am working toward self-actualization.  So, my mental efforts are luxuriously focused on my own development.  Like all people, when I choose to fight, it’s because of something that threatens my own physical or mental well-being, but I am incredibly fortunate that I’m not threatened much.  My angst tends to be around things I see that just don’t feel “right”, yet the negative effect is mostly on others, not on me.

Where am I going with all of this, you ask?  Let go back to the pandemic.  Early on, I was incredibly fearful for my own safety and, of course, for that of those close to me.  We knew so little about how the virus worked and had no natural protection.  Every day was driven by angst-ridden personal fear for basic physiological safety—right back down on the first rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy.  Each infection and death recorded felt personal.  It felt like the Grim Reaper was circling and coming for me.  Over time, as the numbers rose yet I stayed safe, the edge came off.  You can only hold your breath for so long and after a while, the negative impacts of the mitigation efforts started to overwhelm my fear of COVID.  We all started to rationalize and normalize the risk, as we do all the time.  How many of us think about the risk of serious injury in a car accident every time we decide to get behind the wheel?  It’s higher than we’d like to think but if we fixated on it, we’d probably never get in a car.  So, we make the choice to accept that risk, do our best to control what can control, and head to the grocery store.  The same seems to have happened with COVID—a combination of rationalizations (some of which are indeed appropriate) and normalizations.

The problem, of course, is that each time we accept a risk and nothing happens, we are tempted to accept a little more risk.  It’s kind of like a toddler testing the boundaries of his parents’ patience.  He will push until he hits that boundary and there are consequences.  For us adults, though, normalizing those risks and consequences can ultimately have devastating long term impact.  Once we realize that those negative impacts are real and consequential (meaning they impact us directly), changing course can be really difficult.  I talked last time about how long term normalization of unhealthy food and eating habits has led to a really unhealthy population.  Chronic underinvestment in our infrastructure has led to a normalization of addressing things like water mains and bridges only when they fail.  The people fighting hard for change are usually the ones negatively impacted by whatever the rest of us have chosen to normalize.  Must we wait for the impact to hit us before we insist that something isn’t right?  I’m being intentionally vague here since I want each of you to think about what YOU have allowed to normalize that maybe you shouldn’t accept.  Is it something about your own behavior or choices?  It is something societal, like access to healthcare or food insecurity or education?  Is it some policy or strategic or even social norm at work?  Find something that is important to you and decide to just not accept it anymore.  The frog is smart enough to jump out of the boiling water.  Are we?