Notes from the small pond: Stinging truth: Liars lie

There’s that Russian-born fable that everyone’s heard, about the Scorpion and the Frog in which the scorpion convinces the frog to ferry him across the river despite the frog’s reticence about the likelihood of being stung, which the scorpion logically mitigates with the sound point:

“Why the hell would I sting you? Then we’d both drown, dumb-dumb. Just give me a ride across, for God’s sake.”

The chagrined frog nods assent, the scorpion climbs aboard and they’re off.

In mid-river the scorpion silently loads his tail and zaps the frog, injecting the poison that will kill them both. The frog, surprised, but not really, asks:

“Why’d you sting me? Now we’re both going to die!”

The scorpion hunches his shoulders like a teenager and gets honest:

“I stung you because that’s what scorpions do. They sting.”

Then they die.

Fable over.

This one isn’t from Aesop, but there’s plenty around with the same Truth embodied.

One’s nature is tough to negotiate. Asking a scorpion not to sting — even to save its own life — is like asking water to not be wet or a tall person not to be tall or a lazy person not to be lazy. Or like asking a liar not to lie.

We’re all scorpions and frogs. Blessed and doomed to our nature.

Thankfully, unlike amphibians and arachnids, we do have the blessing/curse of human consciousness and a modicum of intelligence through which to sift our respective natures. As such, some of us can successfully “manage” our natures so we’re not constantly enslaved to our most craven natural tendencies, thereby holding off the Zombie Apocalypse … at least so far.

But managing isn’t changing.

And it’s still very early in the game. We’ve been around only about two hundred thousand years, maybe six million, if we count our earliest primate hominid ancestors. That’s a blink of an eye, really — the dinosaurs mastered the planet for about 165 million years … or about 27.5 times longer than us, even if you include our most distant ancestors.

So. All of this reason and intellect and ability to “think about thinking .…” Not sure how great a gift that really is/was in the Garden of Eden, the snake, like the scorpion, just doing what snakes do, like the liars and cheaters and killers and posers that we all know and love and are.

By the way … scorpions can swim just fine.

Parnell Thill is a Cloquet writer.