This last several weeks have seen much of the Fifty States – especially the Southern States – subject to cold, ice, and snow that have messed up everything for a lot of people. In some cases, the weather forecasts were right on target. In others, they got more or less misery. We are told more is coming!

People in different places, of course, react differently. As we Americans are still a mobile lot, in many cases, newcomers to an area found out that not just the weather but customs and the response to the weather are also very different. This article, from Cowboy State Daily is a neat look at that:

Whatever is blamed for the bad weather, the tendency is to believe that it has never been this bad. (When you actually look at the historical records, you find the intensity of these temperatures and storms is uncommon. But the broken records are often only a few decades, or perhaps a century, old.) People have been conditioned to expect conditions to get worse. “Everything is going downhill! Everything is turned upside down!”

But it is more than just expectations that vary. It is a systemic problem.

First, the level of complaints obviously skyrocketed. Or did they? For one, the warning time about this massive, continent-wide event seems to have been much longer than the average. Therefore, people had more time to prepare. And more time to panic! And many did: stores were emptied quickly by people who assumed the worst. Generating more complaints. Various institutions (especially schools) acted, rather than reacting. This in turn caused other problems: from who’s going to watch the kids at home to increasing contracts for clearing parking and access when such services are normally (say, one out of every five years or so) not much in demand. So, more complaining! And of course, publicizing the warnings and the alarms became clickbait extraordinaire. Heightening the panic and the overreaction. But today, courtesy of X, Facebook, Snapchat. and other social media, more and more people know about the complaints and the demands. And their own fears are fed from that.

Secondly, even in just five to six years, many areas of the States have seen tremendous growth and changes in traffic and other impacts on infrastructure. There is more strain, and less capacity to absorb the impacts of severe weather. And more and more areas are paved and create micro-climate “pockets” that can magnify weather effects (and also decrease impacts, which is often ignored). Whether we are talking winds or precipitation, or low temperatures. It is not just the chaotic results, it is the fear generated as we anticipate the chaos.

At the same time, well-publicized catastrophes (such as the LA fires) had both increased fear and increased the demand that “something has to be done now.” And it is now a constant theme that it is government that must solve all these problems, and that our first resort is government action. This is drummed into students in every grade, and reinforced with every newscast, every mainstream media editorial.

The result? Even many people who demand that “government got to do something ’bout this” also are smart enough and experienced enough to know that government (a) can’t do everything, and (b) won’t do everything. We have a severe mental dissonance here, folks. Which ramps up our fears.

And then, of course, we have the true-believers and the conspiracy-theorists. We have those who believe (despite decades of evidence to the contrary) that all this bad weather is extreme and growing worse because of manmade climate change (formerly manmade global warming). On the other hand, we have those who have suspicions that the rather uncommon weather patterns and severity are really manmade. Not the global greenhouse gas business, but directed energy weapons and massive geoengineering efforts. (We’ve found it is difficult to discuss matters calmly and rationally with the extreme members of both camps.)

Perhaps the worst impact, though, is how the nasty weather, the inconveniences, and the hour-by-hour tracking of every fatality that can be blamed on weather drives and enables government.

The 2021 winter weather power nightmare in Texas illustrates this. As a result of dependence on unreliable power suppliers and transmission systems designed for less-severe conditions, billions of dollars were spent in “improvements” which may not have been justified. We can expect that many State and local governments in the South will find increased demands for “better preparations” to be done. Resulting in such issues as doubling the number of snowplows for streets and roads – only to find the new equipment rusting away for 9 out of 10 of the next years because this event is an outlier. And passing new, even draconian laws on homeowners and businesses that cost more money and give more power to bureaucrats (including cops) to write tickets and collect fines.

Perhaps the root of the problem is the failure to accept personal responsibility for our daily lives, leaving it to government and other providers. And not recognizing the imperfect nature of our world.