-by Frank Macdonald
Most people have a phobia or two, be it fear of heights, dentists, snakes, politicians, rats, or computers. Those who claim not to have a phobia are those who have yet to encounter that moment, place or creature who tickles their scream response.
I used to be scared of the idea of it raining cats and dogs until I learned to not take everything I heard literally. So I thought the same when I first heard about downpours of fish or frogs, which turned out to be truly falling out of the clouds somewhere else in the world. Each to his own phobia, obviously.
Many people, apparently, suffer from a weather phobia.
For weather phobia sufferers there couldn’t be a worse time to be alive. For them, living on Planet Earth during this era of global change must be similar to living in a House of Horrors with no exit door.
Among those weather phobias are:
– Astraphobia: fear of thunder and lightning;
– Lilapsophobia: fear of tornadoes and hurricanes;
– Ancraophobia: fear of wind;
– Chionophobia: fear of snow;
– Ombrophobia: fear of rain.
There are other people who sleep on top of earthquakes, or beside an ocean known to toss ashore the occasional tsunami, or live where tornadoes gather for annual house-wrecking ceilidhs. The latter does catch my attention when weather reports become news reports about another tornado bullying its way through a trailer park, flinging aluminum trailers around like they were saucers in a china shop. Living in an aluminum trailer can make you pay closer attention to these reports than someone who is living in a brick house the way a wise little piggy would. Otherwise, I am quite comfortable on the couch listening to the woes of the rest of the world.
Or was.
Learning though that in the current world environment it is possible to grow a crop of phobias as easily as a lawn full of dandelions. And its not just world leaders auditioning for dementia commercials that cause one’s mind to want to forget. It’s the weather. Not the weather in one form or another, but the weather itself that tends to make me tremble.
What helps create this condition is the realization that you are not yet 100 years old, and already you have lived through fifty-one “storms of the century.” And another one on its way, according to dark-hearted meteorologists. The cause of all this record-setting weather is climate change, according to one school of thought, or global warming, according to another. Take your pick.
For those who claim to be climate changers, the weather is undergoing natural changes that have occurred and re-occurred countless times over the aeons through which planet Earth has lived. For them, it is both egotistical and arrogant to think humans have the power to change the weather. According to them, it has nothing to do with human activity the way those obsessed global warmers claim it does.
While trying to find my own place in this debate, my upbringing presses me towards making a decision. It’s a sort of Choose Your Weather Phobia tv game show.
Sitting here at the keyboard in the middle of a -25 degree cold snap, with the kitchen water frozen, I am beginning to realize that phobias can begin at any age. I figured once I got past the monsters in my closet, the snakes under my bed, the Brussel sprouts on my dinner plate, then I had outgrown the phobia stage.
Then, unlike the non-believers, my conversion began, my personal conviction became filled with all the guilt acquired by those of us raised Catholic. When anyone of us sits through those charges of being the person responsible for global warming, the guilt grows gluttonous. Of course it’s my fault that the Earth is exhausted, so exhausted it is thinking of ending it all, including us.
I could never count all the O-rings of cigarette smoke I have exhaled heavenward for decades while wilfully refusing to listen to doctors, David Suzuki or Elizabeth May and company. Or count up all the plastic Pepsi bottles that I discarded over decades of that particular form of caffeine addiction. I have recently learned that huge segments of plastic-filled oceans are choking sea life to death. I haven’t seen an up-close picture, but I know most of that plastic is Pepsi bottles. I fear the environmental police may soon be asking to take my fingerprints.
How much gas fumes, leaded and unleaded, has my history of exhaust pipes expelled into the atmosphere, out-farting the cows ten to one? And I mustn’t forget all the other planet-enhancing, petroleum-fuelled activities I have indulged in as part of my species’ psychopathic need to kill and destroy. At heart, we are all Hannibal Lecters, devouring our environment.
Unless that environment devours us first!
It occurs to me in this guilt-filled confessional that I have acquired a touch of weather phobia myself. I am coming to hate to see the sun rise in the morning, once one of the greatest poetic thrills in my life. Now that I am wiser to the ways of our demented planet (caused by everything we have ever done to it) I fear each sunrise, not knowing what catastrophic surprises it is bringing up with it.
I am considering joining those weather phobia people who do all they can to acquire free flying points, have a large wall map of the world, with coloured pins pinpointing where they expect to be at any given time of the year. If they happen to be inflicted with all of the above they need to live like nomads, always travelling away from the latest weather forecast.
Meanwhile, please allow me to apologize for those -27 degree temperatures earlier this week.