Copycat

A cursory examination of many institutions reveals a sort of demonstrated copycat functionality when one particular formula achieves success. A team wins the Super Bowl or World Series, and immediately, other teams embark on copying the winning team's blueprint. A campaign successfully gets a seemingly small odd challenger elected, and suddenly, we are inundated with attempts to be the most Trumpian.

Alas, this pernicious and insincere form of flattery likely - nay, certainly - leaves on consummate popular pop poet Robert Frost if, such a thing were possible, rolling in his grave. For his most famous poem - an elucidation of taking the road less traveled by - is, the second it is written, an immediate refutation of itself. How many times are we told to not follow the crowd, to be cool by not being cool, to be different, be ourselves. In a more macro sense, no industry perhaps better displays this than that of travel, in which some moderately well off yuppies "discover" a developing, formerly colonized country, extoll its virtues of limited western values and industrial domination, only to, in turn, bring upon it the very forces that will lead to that.

Indeed, one can imagine that, in Frost's supposed yellow wood, metaphor or not, the success of the poem quickly lead both paths to be equally well worn and documented. Given the impending nature of the rapid and seemingly unstoppable forces of global warming we have unleashed, in part upon our constant consumption of the very thing that we use to lead us down said road, a 21st century amendment to the clause might read that one who takes neither road has found that to make all the difference. Until, of course, we are all stationary, staring down a path, unable to make up a decision on which way to go.