This IS Kansas For Crying Out Loud!

Thursday night, May 7, 2009 was as Plan A a night as can be described. The Clark H Smith Family of Wife and Children had just settled in at 8pm CDT to watch the penultimate episode of The Office - Season 5. After 45 seconds of the opening scene, our local weather dweeb, Gary Lezak (KSHB Action Weather Plus), burst onto my huge flat screen to spend the next 30 minutes flagellating himself with the dire peril which was an ominous looking hook cloud formation in the immediate vicinity of Lock Springs, Mo which is 12 miles south of Nowheresville. His 3D graphics were excelled only by the endless recitation of warning to unpopulated intersections such as Sempsel and Spring Hill that the phantom residents there should move to the lowest level of their structure and to the center thereof. (We wound up watching Ace of Cakes instead - a program that cares neither about weather porn, eminent civil danger... or viewership for that matter.)

The Smith Family level of irritation over the situation was palpable and immeasurable - betraying a level of self-indulgence possible only in our Plan A world. Our Plan A world affords us the new and unique ability to spot tornadoes before they strike (anywhere significant) and even before they actually form (hence the lust for "hook clouds". Owning such previously God-restricted ability, we are clearly over-disposed to using it, whether the alarm has any value or merit. Lacking any sane metric for when to actually provide meaningful weather warnings, those meteorological scalawags down to the TV station foist their alarm willynilly. We're at the brink of technology become irrelevant by overuse. (Anyone ever heard of the little boy who cried "Wolf!"?)

What's the Plan B point of this (or am I just wedging in this rant for the sake of taking a shot at Gary Lezak - not counting the 400 emails I sent him while he droned on about hook clouds and root cellars)? In the future, after SHTF and TEOTWAWKI has passed, I won't have any more clue about weather than "red sky at morning". A hook cloud can form over the north 40 or northern Canada and it won't make any difference to me. In Plan B world, all weather, like politics will be local. How will this affect the quality of my life? Obviously, I won't have Gary and his Nano-Doppler(TM) 4Warn(TM) SkyCast(TM) TerrorGraphics(TM) BlockWatch(TM) HailYes(TM) ESPrediction(TM) services to jack up my blood pressure. When the storm comes, I'll do what people did for millenia - hunker down and wait.

I've lived in Tornado Alley (as designated by the US Dept of In-Case-of-Emergency-You're-On-Your-Own) for the last 40 years. I've never been within 50 statute miles of a (alleged) tornado strike. I'm not trying to make this all about me (just in case any of my readers know someone who lived in Greensburg KS). I'm observing that we overindulge ourselves with information simply because we have it. It is the "having it" that seems to make it important. The question is, "lacking it" what will the difference be? My guess these thunderclouds of information will matter very, very little. In Plan B world, what matters is what happens to me and my ability to survive. I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying...