Yes It’s True: Our romance with past takes on weather

One of the more interesting aspects of the massive winter storm that visited Friday and Saturday was so may Facebook posts second guessing area schools for deciding to shut down before nasty conditions came along.

Some suggested that school officials were wusses for not having school Friday and instead closing in expectation of major snowstorm. Some went one step further by saying in the good old days, when men were men and women were women, they’d courageously gut it out, attend school and boldly travel on treacherous roads.

I’ve seen plenty of Facebook posts that suggest today’s young people are soft. Young people in the past risked their lives on D-Day at Normandy Beach while youth nowadays are fearful of a tiny virus.

Part of this controversy is that WOOD-TV chief meteorologist Ellen Bacca said in an interview that technology has made weather forecasting far more accurate than in days gone by. The Ellen Baccas, Sarah Flynns and Matt Kirkwoods use highly superior information and science to that used by Buck Matthews and Frank Slaymaker. And once again, this issue demonstrates mistrusting science.

It’s that old game of romanticizing the past and puffing out your chest because you didn’t wear seat belts, rode in the back of pickup trucks and drank water out of the backyard hose.

The Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy troupe did a terrific skit on this process called “Four Yorkshiremen.” I think it speaks volumes:

“We used to live in this tiny old house, with great big holes in the roof.

“House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!

“You were lucky to have a ROOM! We used to have to live in a corridor!

“We used to DREAM of livin’ in a corridor! Woulda’ been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!?

“Well when I say ‘house’ it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.

“We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!

“You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

“Cardboard box?

Aye.

“You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

“Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

“Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o’clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

“Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, (pause for laughter), drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing ‘Hallelujah.’

MP: But you try and tell the young people today that… and they won’t believe ya’.

Former Pine Street Elementary Principal and Retired Wyoming Lee Supt. David Britten may have the final word on Facebook:

“And now all the assholes that think they are smarter are complaining about the schools’ decisions to close today, and spouting their delusions about how much worse it was when they were kids. 

Predictable.”