There's A Storm Coming

One of the first things I do in the morning after getting out of bed is look outside.  It's a habit I developed years ago.  It has stayed with me throughout my life.  It isn't very profitable I guess. I just want to see what its like outside. When I leave the safety of my house I want to know what to expect.

 Today the sky is heavily overcast.  The sun is hidden somewhere behind the thick layer of clouds. They aren't the menacing kind of clouds I sometimes see in the spring and summer. They are just overcast clouds and nothing to worry about – just like many of the days I have seen before.  The birds are still flying, dogs are still barking and all-in-all its just a normal winter day.

There are those people, known as weather prognosticators, more commonly known as weather forecasters, who are sounding an alarm.  They are saying a winter storm is coming.  It may dump seven or more inches of snow.  At times they predict the snow will be falling at a rate of two inches per hour.  That’s a lot of snow.

 But, you know what?  I’ve heard this all before.  Weather forecasters and even a government agency have made fearful predictions before.  Most of the time they don’t come true.  It has gotten to the point where I take everything they have to say with a grain of salt.  A shrug of the shoulders and an “oh, right…” trailing off my tongue and I continue on my way.

 Dire predictions are being heard today.  Predictions of things getting much worse before they get better; of house values continuing to fall; of joblessness continuing to rise and of rebellion and discord in our country are being stated publicly.  And, like my response to a winter storm warning, many people hear the predictions and dismiss them as the ravings of right wing lunatics or fear mongering newscasters.  

 Through the years I have learned even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while.  The fact of faulty predictions does not nullify the accuracy of truthful ones.  The danger in easily dismissing a warning is this - one warning may be right.  If we refuse to heed words of warning and the storm hits we are at best foolish and at worst doomed to experience all the violence the storm produces.

 Most of us choose to ignore the warning or worse than that to shut the forecaster’s mouth.  We figure if no one says it, it won’t happen.  The authorities tried to do this in the Bible, you know.  The rationale was if we deal with the troublesome talker the problem is solved.  “When the priest Passhur son of Immer, the chief officer in the temple of the Lord, heard Jeremiah prophesying these things, he had Jeremiah the prophet beaten and put in the stocks at the Upper Gate…” (Jeremiah 20:1-2a)  Deal with the man doing the warning.  Beat him.  Put him in jail.  Let him rot.  Skewed thinking, don’t you think?  We may be “more civilized” (whatever that means) in our treatment of voices of warning today – but we accomplish the same thing.  Shut them up, they are scaring the people.  Perhaps people need to become scared.  Perhaps we need to be shaken out of  the doldrums and given a good dose of reality.

 I heard a government official make this comment – “the government will have to take over the banks for a time until they can be stabilized.”  The truth is our government always begins with “for a time” but it never ends that way.  Once the government gets its hooks of regulation into any private enterprise “for a time” has vanished.  Government control never leaves.  There never has been and never will be anything free from the government.  Bailouts come tied with the governmental rope of regulation.  And in the government’s hands ropes are used for strangling.  Oh, by the way, I thought you'd like to know, it’s beginning to snow!