Living With Lies

At my age, re-calibration of the brain requires effort. Take the weather for example. I recall the days when my late father-in-law was farming in the Arkansas Delta. When the crops lay parched and withering in the summer heat, a “weather-man” might predict an 80 percent chance of rain for the area next day.

Yay.

What it would mean, though, was there was an infinitesimal chance that a late afternoon shower might bring a fine mist over an adjoining farm, not enough to settle the dust by any stretch of the imagination, just a thin, teasing, cruel cloud that knew exactly where property lines lay.

Farmers like him learned to live with it.

Fast forward. The abuse of our planet by us homo sapiens changed things. We might call what we experience now the monsoons except for one thing, and I speak from experience. Monsoons end. They may seem to last forever, but they ultimately end. Our climate-induced "rainsoons" don’t end, though

No, what we are experiencing now requires recalibration. Now when the “weather-person” says there is a slight chance of “showers” producing less than and inch of rain, prepare for five to seven inches. Farmers lean on their tractors staring at the lake that used to be their best bean field wondering what the next "shower" will bring.

Do the weather-people lie with evil intent? Probably not. I think that prevarication has just become so popular among some politicians that a segment of the population takes it as the normal.

This doesn’t bode well if you ask me. It has all the earmarks of a national emergency.