hurricanes when i was growing up

He decided how hard the winds should blow and how much rain should fall. (Job 28:25)

I grew up in south Texas on the coast. We lived in a town called Freeport for much of the first years of my life. Freeport was well below Houston and right on the Gulf Coast.

Because of the proximity to the Gulf of Mexico, we had a lot of hurricanes. They would blow in and we would hunker down in the house to wait them out. My father worked for Houston Lighting and Power so he had to go out into the storms to repair electrical lines as they broke.

This was a bruising job in that he climbed 100 foot poles in hurricane force winds. I was told that the poles would sway quite a bit and occasionally someone would fall off.

But people want their electricity so out they would go and work sometimes for days before coming back home.

And when they came back home, sometimes they came back to homes that had been destroyed by the storms.

We only ran one time. That was Hurricane Carla in 1961. We went inland about fifty miles and stayed in a garage apartment during the storm. Carla was a particularly bad storm, a Category Five hurricane so a lot of damage was done.

In a storm like this, the power of raw nature is so apparent. Whole houses were gone, whole subdivisions wiped out, many families left homeless having lost all their possessions.

We never did. There were a couple of times we had mildew from the water lapping against the bottoms of the floors or meat ruined when the electricity went out and the freezer was off too long in the South Texas heat, but in general, we were blessed.

But it was funny. We never ran except from the Category Five Hurricane Carla. That was a bad one and it was good we did. Freeport was hurt badly in the storm. In general, we rode them out.

We would sit and do something, reading, or playing games. My mother would try her best to keep us from worrying while she herself was consumed with worry about my father working in the storm. When the lights went off, as they always did, we would light candles.

I really do not remember what all we did in the storms, while the hurricane raged outside our home, but I do remember the strength of my mother, keeping her family from harm. And I remember that I was never afraid.

When I hear people today gibbering in fear from the small storms that hit, I remember her and her strength. And I remember us sitting in the dark with candles lit, doing whatever it was we did, waiting.

it has occurred to me that as a nation we are rapidly becoming wimps

It has occurred to me that as a nation we are rapidly becoming wimps.

The furor over Hurricane Irene has been just plain stupid.

I was raised on coastal Texas, in Freeport in particular. We went through a number of hurricanes in my life. We left town for only one. One. That one was Hurricane Carla, a category five hurricane in 1961.

Even then we didn’t go far, just to southwest Houston. Just far enough to get out of the main danger.

For the most part, we would sit through the hurricane doing various things. When the electricity went out, we would light lanterns and candles and have fun listening to the wind and rain. My mother was very inventive during hurricanes.

All our neighbors did too. And I never knew one single person to get hurt by them.

In fact, in 1983, I went out into Hurricane Alicia and stood for a while in the 100 mile an hour winds just to see what it was like.

My father worked for the light company in the greater Houston area and had to work all during the storms to keep the lights on and to keep things from getting too bad.

I suppose one of the reasons we may not have gone far was because he was still around and my mother didn’t want to leave him. I don’t know. But I do know that my wife would be reluctant to leave me in the same situation.

But the thing is, we sat them out.

Today there is the Weather Channel and CNN. They are on 24 hours a day and need news and weather to keep going. So they will manufacture any emergency they can to get viewers.

To see them gibbering at some little category two storm is pathetic. And in their gibbering, all they do is scare people. And people are ready for some reason to be scared.

It has turned the nation into a bunch of wimps.

The people of New York were ready to see bodies floating face down in the river that had been Fifth Avenue, according to one correspondent. They barely had any rain.

The mayor of New York, a wimp and control freak himself, ordered everybody out (as if people had extra places to go like rich mayors). His comment afterwards was that nothing much happened, that was true. But he would do it again if it saved a life.

What he has done is magnify false emergencies. When real emergencies come, and they will, people will pay no attention. People will be in trouble because those in charge are idiots.

We seem to have become a nation of idiots, running scared at every little thing that happens. Every pill that has been tampered with, every vegetable that has a mark on it that could be something bad, every little storm – sooner or later we become either scared to death or uncaring.

We have lost all perspective. Thanks to people like the mayor of New York and Al Gore with his Global Foolishness and others, we are running all different directions acting like major idiots.

Whatever happened to American self-reliance? To American ingenuity? To bravery in the “home of the brave?”

I mourn our passing as a great nation. There will be nothing worth having when it is gone.