The Boiling Point

I’m a little embarrassed that it’s taken me 55 years to learn this: Cold water is fine for clothes.

All this time I thought you had to wash them in hot water. But no, turns out detergent is smarter now. It does more. The enzymes activate at lower temperatures. They hold onto oil molecules better (or something).

Cold water uses less energy. The colours hold. The elastic holding it all together doesn’t give out.

Let others boil

Canada is known for being cold, although not everywhere — there are literally palm trees at my city’s airport. But geopolitically, we’ve always been the cold water.

Our neighbours to the south have always believed in heat. Passion. Urgency. It’s not always bad. That same spark built split atoms and put people on the moon.

But it must be exhausting to live in that heat all the time. The noise of the machine wears you down. The fabric pulls. The democracy that once fit perfectly starts to shrink around the edges.

Slow burn politics

Our own politics have been trying to turn the heat up lately.

• Talking points copied straight out of the MAGA playbook.

• Scripted shouting matches on Facebook.

• Premiers scoring points with their base by yelling about trans kids, while quietly dismantling the public health system in the backrooms.

You don’t need to plunge a country into boiling water to destroy it.

You just need to turn up the heat slowly enough that nobody notices. 

The myth of the boiling frog

Something else I’ve had wrong all my life was that saying about the frog. You know the one—about how if you drop a frog in boiling water, it jumps out, but if you warm it slowly, it stays until it dies.

Turns out, it’s not true. The frogs actually will jump out.

In that way, they’re smarter than us. Because often, we stay put. We adjust. We tell ourselves the rising political temperature is probably normal. Nothing to worry about. These bubbles around us aren’t a warning.

That’s what happens when a country stops paying attention. When outrage becomes background noise. When straight-up lies go unchallenged. When the heat rises one degree at a time and we tell ourselves it’s still fine.

What keeps a nation from tearing

Every country is fabric in the end: threads of pride and pain, hope and history, woven by people who care enough to keep it from tearing.

Some nations scrub themselves raw trying to stay spotless. Others live with a few stains, because they know the cloth still holds.

All that matters is that the fabric lasts. That it still fits the people it was made for. That the beautiful colours it holds endure without being bleached away.

If we don’t watch the temperature, even the strongest fabric can tear apart before we notice.

And if we don’t resist, we risk becoming, well, America.

Boiled slowly, one degree at a time.