the weather

Recently, there was a delightful snow storm that dumped about six inches of powdery white goodness all over the ground. Now, since I used to live in Maine, I am sort of used to it. Yes, I hated shoveling the snow. I usually over-exerted my back. I remember I had to take 1600mg of ibuprofen to alleviate the pain. That was the past, but I remember I had to shovel snow extensively every winter. I'm surprised I didn't destroy my kidneys.

Then I enlisted for four years in the Marine Corps, and I spent two of those years in a sub-tropical island. I remember I landed in Okinawa on December 26^th, and it was 76 degrees. I loved it. No more shoveling! Hooray!

I come back to this country, and the winters were literal cake-walks. They barely got cold. In fact, the winters in Maine and Illinois were balmy. For a short while, it would get below 25 degrees. That, to me, is cold. However, those periods only lasted about three weeks.

Cut to this winter, everything changes. Perhaps, I should say everything switches back to how they used to be. Whenever a "severe" snow storm was on the horizon, the news outlets would go insane with Chicken Little overreactions. They sky was falling! It is going to be freezing! Don't leave your houses! I think to myself snow is part of a normal winter. Whenever a news program goes bananas over the "severe" winter weather, what they are really reporting is the fact that winter weather -- real winter weather -- is a thing of the past, and to experience real winter weather is a rarity. People just got used to tepid winter seasons.

Winters are getting warmer. Winters are not supposed to be balmy in the northern regions of this country. One Christmas I had to shovel, and it was 60 degrees. Wow.

Another thing about this new (old) phenomenon is that whenever there is a span of real winter weather all the naysayers, who don't believe in global warming, scream at the top of their lungs and say that global warming isn't real. Of course, when there is twenty consecutive days of 100+ degree weather, category-5 hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and years of droughts over whole sections of this country, they are oddly silent. Curious.

Global warming is real. I remember hearing these conversations when I was four years old, back in 1984. Of course, Americans didn't do a damn thing about it because we were too busy driving our gas-guzzling cars, eating, and shopping. Apathy will get us nowhere. Except a planet overflowing with garbage and nothing else.

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