"Even Walmart Was Closed"
What's telling is that whenever there's a stray flurry of snow in the air, our local weather anchors ride to the rescue, hogging airtime and triggering their network's version "Operation Emergency Snowflake".
And yet when wind gusts arrive that the National Weather Service says were of speeds never recorded in our area, we aren't alerted ahead of time and I don't see the familiar faces in front of their weather maps.
(The way I understand it is that forecasters missed the damaging winds because it was sunny. They expected clouds to slow down Ike's winds, but instead it was a bright sunny day in Ohio and that produced a "race-track effect" for 70mph+ wind gusts.)
But isn't this the way it always goes? We get excited over a snow flurry but miss the real story?
Another example from the temporal world: There was a lot of angst and hand-wringing over the failure of an insignificant energy company called Enron, which prompted massive retaliatory government regulation. Meanwhile the mortgage and financial industries were quietly melting down. No one even seemed to notice. But then that's the way it goes - you can't prepare for catastrophe because mostly you don't know it's coming (New Orleans the exception) until it's too late.
I feel little shame over my country with respect to Iraq; most of Europe ought feel shame for surreptiously selling oil to Saddam and failing to enforce U.N. resolutions. But I do feel shame that because the United States can't do something as simple as sell mortgages, the whole world has to suffer the consequences.
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