Monday 26 February 2018

Panic!


Social media as well as other media is alive with warnings re the forthcoming snowstorm that will hit us tonight and tomorrow.  Panic is ensuing as police offer driving advice, weathermen gives constant updates and we are given the impression that a storm of untold magnitude will arrive.
It might offer three or four inches of snow.
Now I appreciate warnings as to such weather, I understand information from the police re roads, railways re services and other helpful news will enable life to continue in the difficulties but there is in my view a sense of needless panic in the air caused by this storm.
We have had them before, I grew up with them as they happen every year, usually around this time, yet we continued to live as normally as possible.  Schools closed then as now in spite of old folks grumbling that they never closed in the past, roads get slippy and blocked, trains services are delayed and within a day or two everything is back to normal.
It may well be this will be a week of snow and cold nights, minus 4 around here probably tonight, but most folks will survive and the world will slowly continue.  The panic, the warnings the neurosis which comes with every weather occurrence is however a new phenomena which reflects badly on a nation which is not able to cope with anything that upsets their equilibrium. Maybe we have as they say become soft and cannot cope, maybe we are just more obviously selfish than we once were as a nation.  After all we have long since dumped the 'all together for one another' attitude that saw people through two world wars and a depression or two, that created the NHS and organised the nation to work for the common good.  All that is gone and the self is the most important aspect for most people, politicians have a lot to answer for as have the media.
I must go out in this tomorrow, I suspect I will survive unless frostbite gets me...


2 comments:

the fly in the web said...

I just hope that the effort to get rough sleepers to shelter starts an awareness that the problem needs a permanent solution.... and hope too that the shelter effort includes those poor dogs that cling to them through thick and thin.

Adullamite said...

Fly, Awareness yes, action no.