The frogs will only stay in the pot if the heat of the water is increased gradually.
One of the great tragedies of this nation was the Civil War. And an even greater aspect of its tragedy was that it could have been avoided. The abolitionists wanted slavery abolished immediately because of the great evil that it obviously was. The southern slaveholders were not about to voluntarily abide a financial hit of the magnitude that the overnight abandonment of the property, albeit human, that the 4 plus million slaves represented. The Republicans came on the political scene in 1860 with their candidate, Lincoln, supposedly proposing to follow a gradualist, middle road, compromising approach to deal with this “peculiar institution.” Their stated objective was that slavery was to be confined to the states where it was currently legal, and eventually and gradually, eliminated altogether over time. Looking back over the 150 years since we killed almost 750,000 of our fellow citizens after South Carolina led the way into that dark night; the wisdom of gradualism seems to be far more the preferred approach. The United States could have purchased every slave from every slaveholder at a fair market price and manumitted him or her for far less than the cost of suppressing the rebellion.
This same wisdom of gradualism could have been applied to the recent executive order to shut down coal-fired power generation plants. A shut down rate of these plants tied to the efficiency gains in the wind, solar, and tidal generation of power would have been preferred to the precipitous shutdown timetable currently scheduled. The job losses anticipated with the shut down of the coal plants could have been matched with the job gains arriving as the alternative power sources were developed.
It seems to me that the Creator of the universe practices gradualism. 500 years ago we only suspected that the world was globe; in fact people were burned at the stake for even saying that this was a possibility. And today there may be a very small group that is unaware of this fact. 50 years ago DNA was an unknown. Today it is a given and gives us Christians renewed hope of reconstituted bodies that we have been promised for 2000 years.
So if the universe Creator practices gradualism to prevent the overload of the information processor of the human portion of His creation; and He promises us wisdom for the asking; then we should very readily practice the wisdom of gradualism at every opportunity. The frogs will only stay in the pot if the heat of the water is increased gradually.
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