After Thanksgiving and Black Friday comes Gray Monday, when we return all the stuff we thoughtlessly bought just because it was on sale. But there is good news. Yesterday, November 30th, was the official end of the Atlantic hurricane season. Jamaica and other islands suffered catastrophic damage from storms, but apart from a bit of wind, all was calm in our listening area.
You may say, as my mother would certainly have done: “Don’t mention hurricanes, it’s bad luck.” This is an interesting survival of the ancient superstition that “naming calls” – if you mention a bad thing, it will appear, like the devil or certain politicians. It doesn’t seem to work for good things, like Danish pastries, I’ve tried. But now I have named both hurricanes and the devil, so we may all be doomed. Sorry about that.
Mother Nature can be an abusive parent, and hurricanes are one of the most brutal things she can do to us. They have been blamed on everything from God’s vengeance to global warming. Nobody has thought of blaming the Democrats yet, though they will. Long Island was practically blown off the map in 1938, and Sandy in 2012 was no joke either.
Every year, almost without fail, the National Hurricane Center warns of more storm activity than usual along the East Coast. At the end of every hurricane season, they congratulate themselves because the weather was less devastating than they had predicted. This is rather annoying, like those vague but empty terrorist warnings that suggest that something bad may happen, somewhere, sometime, so we had better watch out for whatever it is. Chicken Little seems to be acting as a consultant to several government departments - the sky is always falling.
The trouble with worrying about uncertain disasters is that you could end up in the nursing home at the end of your life, feeling cheated, because none of them ever happened, and a lifetime of worrying had been wasted.
But there is yet more good news. We may not have to worry about these threatening forecasts much longer. Hurricane forecasting is based on science, and much of this science comes from a federal organization, the grandly named National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which operates the Hurricane Center. Now, there’s not much more important on the planet than the oceans and the atmosphere. Still, in line with the current administration’s anti-science policy, the budget of NOAA has been dramatically cut so that much of the climate forecasting data will be unavailable or incomplete. It will presumably be replaced by guesswork, magical thinking, or silence.
This is a return to tradition. People in the past did not have any warnings about hurricanes. They were always a surprise, and knowing that a hurricane might blow up at any time kept them on their toes. The past was full of such unexpected perils, and we have become too much protected by our Governments with things like health care, safety inspections, FDA warnings, FEMA rescue missions, social security, and a hundred other government programs designed to blunt the cruel hand of fate. Freed from all this mollycoddling, we will be forced to return to the sturdy stoicism of our ancestors, who knew that they had to accept their fate when they saw it coming or, in the case of hurricanes, did not see it coming.
