A while back I wrote a column about frogs and their alleged propensity for not noticing, until it was too late, that they were being boiled to death. And then this morning it occurred to me that …

RIBBET!!!

I was in danger of becoming a frog.

Over the last several weeks, any number of events have occurred that in any universe other than Trump World would have sent my liberal self into paroxysms of righteous indignation.

There was the basic inhumanity of separating children from their parents at the border without any pretense of due process, followed by the basic incompetence of having no plan in place to reunite them with their families.

There was the presidential pardon of Dwight and Steven Hammond, the father-son duo who were convicted by a jury of their peers of committing arson on federally owned land to cover up evidence of illegal poaching. Once again, the pardon power was used to negate the outcome of the criminal justice system for no overarching reason other than as a sop to the far-right fringe of the president’s base.

There was the vilification of Canada and Mexico, who are among our major trading partners, followed by the imposition of tariffs on specific classes of goods being imported from these countries, which, in turn, resulted in retaliatory tariffs being imposed on goods being exported from the United States. As in all trade wars, the increased cost of goods subject to tariff will largely be borne by the ultimate consumer at the checkout counter.

There was picking a trade war with China with America’s farmers, who are least able to survive a protracted conflict, being used as pawns in an international game of chess, or more accurately, an international game of chicken.

There was the savaging of our partners in the NATO alliance, that went so far as to portray them, and the countries they represent, as potential economic foes, rather than as partners in the work of protecting western democracy, a task that has been NATO’s primary mission for the past 70 years.

There was the violation of all the norms of diplomatic etiquette by, while a guest in another’s country, trashing that nation’s leader in private while lavishing insincere over-the-top praise in public.

Finally, there was the Stinky in Helsinki.

The President of the United States took the word of a trained liar, who had everything to gain by lying, over the assessment of his own intelligence community, which had nothing to gain by lying, and had much to lose if proven to be in error.

Almost as a throwaway, by elevating a meeting with his Russian counterpart to the level of a “summit,” the President of the United States also conferred upon a former KGB operative that which he most desires and least deserves—the status of leader of an international super power, which, with a national economy smaller than that of the state of California, modern-day Russia demonstrably is not.

With all these events occurring in just the last few weeks, you would think there would be outrage. Instead, there is a growing sense of indifference. There is a danger of becoming desensitized, like a frog in a pot of boiling water, to specific instances of what used to be thought unthinkable now becoming normalized as just another day in Making America Great Again, circa 1956.

America can survive fools. It can survive narcissistic would-be autocrats. What it may not survive is the insidious daily drip of the abnormal becoming accepted as normal by the population at large.

It is the continuing obligation of those who have eyes to see, for those who have ears to hear, and for those who have mouths to speak, even when speaking out seems futile.

Because the greatest betrayal of the republic is to do nothing at all.