January 6, 2016 Article

The Old Coot wants freedom from weather nannies.

By Merlin Lessler

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. “Tomorrow will be sunny!” (We prepared for rain.) But, at least he didn’t couch his predictions by using percentages or vague terms like partial sunshine, slight chance of rain or likely clear all day. He just put it out there, “Sunny!”

It was a more interesting world. The weatherman said, “Sunny;” 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’t fixate on weather back then. It wasn’t the lead story on the evening news. We weren’t 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’s meteorologists were around scaring people in the caveman era, we’d still be there, cowering in the caves.

The United States had hurricanes when I was growing up; they’re not something new. The weather service named them like they do today, except they only used women’s names. Now, men’s names are alternated with women’s. I guess it’s the Weather Service’s 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 African wasn’t portrayed as a looming threat to life and limb and obsessed over for weeks on end by the meteorologists on the evening news.

Snowstorms, on the other hand, did not earn a name back then. They were expected, a normal winter weather condition. Society hadn’t yet succumbed to the weather paranoia that’s 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? 

So what’s my point? I don’t know exactly. I’m weather forecast challenged. It’s disabling at times. I find myself overcome with Weather Forecast Overload 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’t have to be told it’s 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, “Leave me alone!”