I miss the old weather. The kind we had when I was a kid growing up in the fifties. Before the zealots took over. The weatherman back then (and it always was a man) was more of a joke than anything. Nobody took him serious. His forecasts were often wrong. \u201cTomorrow will be sunny!\u201d (We prepared for rain.) But, at least he didn\u2019t couch his predictions by using percentages or vague terms like partial sunshine, slight chance of rain<\/i> or likely clear all day<\/i>. He just put it out there, \u201cSunny!\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a more interesting world. The weatherman said, \u201cSunny;\u201d we hoped for the best, but took our umbrellas. We got wet. We got hot. We got cold. We got snowed in. But, we coped. After all, we are human, and equipped to adapt to a changing environment. We didn\u2019t fixate on weather back then. It wasn\u2019t the lead story on the evening news. We weren\u2019t bombarded with advice on how to prepare for it. Our mothers taught us to buckle our boots, put on our mittens, wear a raincoat and never seek shelter under a tree in a thunderstorm. If today\u2019s meteorologists were around scaring people in the caveman era, we\u2019d still be there, cowering in the caves.<\/p>\n
The United States had hurricanes when I was growing up; they\u2019re not something new. The weather service named them like they do today, except they only used women\u2019s names. Now, men\u2019s names are alternated with women\u2019s. I guess it\u2019s the Weather Service\u2019s attempt to be politically correct. Hurricane Hazel blew through here in 1954; it was the talk of the town for decades. Some of us old coots still talk about it. But, every thunderstorm sliding off the west coast of Africa wasn\u2019t portrayed as a looming threat to life and limb and obsessed over for weeks on end by the meteorologists on the evening news.<\/p>\n
Snowstorms, on the other hand, did not earn a name back then. They were expected, a normal winter weather condition. Society hadn\u2019t yet succumbed to the weather paranoia that\u2019s been foisted on us by the U.S. Weather Service and the media. Snowstorms blew in and limped out. Without a name! A real bad blizzard was referred to by the year it occurred in. There are four historic ones: The Blizzard of 1888, the Blizzard of 1899, the Blizzard of 1913 and the one a lot of us remember, the Blizzard of 1993. Twenty-five snowstorms were named last winter alone. It started with Atlas and Boreas. How many do you remember?<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s my point? I don\u2019t know exactly. I\u2019m weather forecast challenged. It\u2019s disabling at times. I find myself overcome with Weather Forecast Overload<\/i> every 12 months or so: the squawks that take over my TV set, the dramatization of weather disasters around the globe and being treated like a child and told to put on a coat by some well groomed meteorologist pointing to an indecipherable weather pattern on a map of the country. It just gets to me. Let the weather unfold. Let it be a surprise. Let us enjoy it. Let us deal with it as it happens, not dread its coming. We don\u2019t have to be told it\u2019s raining; we can figure that out on our own. Especially, us old guys, we can feel it in our bones. To the Weather Service and their legions of accomplices in the media, I can only say those three little words that us old coots utter whenever we push back at the nannies running the nanny state, \u201cLeave me alone!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I miss the old weather. The kind we had when I was a kid growing up in the fifties. Before the zealots took over. The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"yoast_head":"\n