The Sky Falls…Get Used To It

Denver was expecting a big snowstorm this weekend. On Friday, the weather forecasters on all the local channels had everyone in full on survival mode with Winter Storm Warnings posted for counties all along the Front Range. Ahead of the storm, grocery stores were packed with people and short on food. There were lines at gas stations, and events were cancelled in advance of what might possibly be up to 18 inches of snow over 48 hours. (Go ahead and laugh at us, Boston and Buffalo. We deserve it.) While all the preparations were going on, I shook my head and made plans to see a movie. I knew we had enough food to survive weeks even if it meant we would have to eat canned tuna and white rice, so I went back to watching Season 2 of Scandal. After a lifetime in Colorado, I don’t spend much time worrying about snow. It’s cold. It’s white. It happens. Every single year. Many times. We own shovels, all-wheel drive cars with snow tires, and skis, for sweet baby Jesus’s sake. I’m not exactly sure why snow surprises people. We freaking live here at a mile high where it can snow pretty much any time between September and May, and it does. While it can be annoying when the first flake of snow falls before summer has officially ended or when we’re halfway through spring and our tulips and daffodils get crushed under a heavy, wet, spring snow, it’s hardly shocking. It’s par for the course.

It’s Sunday evening as I write this. Most of the storm has passed, and we have about 8 inches of snow on the ground, which is not surprisingly less than was forecast. The snow continues to fall lightly, but the roads are plowed. They are icy in spots but not impassable. Even when the heaviest snow was moving through last night and the visibility was diminished, hubby and I were able to return home from an afternoon viewing of American Sniper without incident by driving cautiously in the blowing snow. So far it appears, to the great chagrin of our sons, that most schools will be open tomorrow. And after two snowy days, the sun is even scheduled to make an appearance. As I predicted, the sky, while yielding snowfall, has not itself fallen. The world will go on.

What I’ve been puzzling over all weekend is the way we Americans get ourselves in a tizzy over everything these days. We’ve come a long way from the American pioneers who drove wagons pulled by oxen over unmapped territory, encountering new landscapes and sometimes grumpy natives, without assistance from the National Weather Service, CNN, and global positioning systems. Sadly, we’ve become a nation full of Chicken Littles who thrive on drama. Perhaps it’s because we live in the cushiest time yet experienced that we’ve become completely paralyzed by the notion of adversity? You’d think with all the information available to us we would find ourselves at greater ease. Instead we experience the opposite. The news overwhelms us. Everything we hear causes panic. We live in fear of everything from Ebola to measles, terrorism to random acts of violence, natural disasters to run-of-the-mill snowstorms. What I can’t decide is if we are so conditioned as human beings to endure calamity (fight or flight, you know) that in the relative absence of it we can’t help but continually ready ourselves for it. Is it because of our human makeup that we are unable to relax or have we with our non-stop, 24-hours-a-day news cycles created a relentless culture of fear?

I’m sure I don’t have the answer to these questions. I simply know that we become stressed far too easily these days over things that aren’t really worth the worry. And if I get to the store tomorrow and find it devoid of milk, eggs, and toilet paper because the storm crazies preparing for a veritable Snowmageddon snarfed it all up on Friday when I was binge watching Scandal, everything will still be fine. I just won’t be making any omelets.