As Old Man Winter batters New England and other parts of the country, my mind wanders back to the winters of my 1970s youth.
It was a decade of really, really bad
winter storms that all seemed completely in synch with the issue of “My Weekly Reader” I read in the winter of 1972-1973 that informed me and tens of millions of other schoolchildren across the country that we were entering the New Ice Age!
The issue had quite an effect on me, almost like the planetarium scene from “Rebel Without A Cause,” with its photos of glaciers and men with icicles hanging off their mustaches.
In the winter of 1973-1974 there were horrible ice storms that took down power lines so many times that I became used to losing power and reading by flashlight. In April, just when we thought it was over, we were hit with such a whopper storm that my family documented in home movies as we held signs with the date.
The great storm of the decade was the Blizzard of 1978. That storm shut down the state for more than a week and created 20-foot drifts that rose up like mountains. That February storm was all the worse because it came on top of a January storm that was nearly as bad.
During both storms I went outside to experience it all, especially watching the storm winds sweep over the trees at the far end of the cow field across the street. The winds would touch down onto the field and then accelerate towards our yard.
In the 1980s, the harsh winters went away, but as I stood at the edge of that cow field, I had no doubt that the New Ice Age was upon us.
It was not because I feared what is now called “climate change,” it was that I feared shoveling my driveway. I hated the constant cutting out of blocks of snow that I would shovel over my shoulder. I hated the steps and walks that had to be cleared wide and swept clean. I hated that the race to finish with the other boys on the street shoveling their own driveways became a test of my nascent manhood that was constantly on the line whenever it snowed.
Just as I am thinking about those mornings, it occurs to me that some of my hostility to government involvement in my life flows from my reaction to the snow plows that would scream down the street and block the driveway again with a huge berm of heavy, dirty ice and snow in the process of making the streets clear for the greater good.
It did not help when I saw one driver laughing as he added another hour of shoveling to my life.
Sitting here in 2014, I wonder if the environmentalists are stifling chuckles at this winter we find ourselves in. For many environmentalists the Global Warming hoax was a massive payday. Like shakedown artists they collected consulting fees from private companies and like foxes in the hen house, they collected grants from pliant local, state and federal agencies. Throw in the billions looted from the Treasury by fake green energy companies run by environmentalists and their pals.
When this winter started to turn bad, conservatives finally started to get traction as they pointed out that after 15 years of being told the earth has a fever, things were demonstrably cold. Very cold. Getting colder.
The Left reacted immediately straight out of the “Rules for Radicals” playbook. Instead of acknowledging the obviously colder world, they attacked conservatives as: “climate deniers.” This is a particularly evil construct because its deliberate likeness to “Holocaust deniers.”
When the snow continued to fall, even the Left had to admit that things were not as warm as before.
Now, we are told that the extreme cold is actually part of the greater warming trend—and that the big heat is hiding in oceans waiting for the moment to strike. #tangledweb
For the record, my first problem with the environmentalists is that they are con artists. My other problem is that I resent their efforts to stop global warming, which if only it were true, would free boys from shoveling driveway and save us from the New Age Ice, that apparently was hiding in the ocean…