There was certainly more to it, the criticism of Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin when he said we were sending the wrong message to young people in our reaction to this latest blast of arctic air sweeping the Midwest. It surprised me too that the zero-degree temperatures were responded to almost as if it were the end of the world. Hey, its winter in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, it gets cold and snowy. So what? But even as Democrats were pushing to make climate change the main topic of the 2020 presidential run there was something phony about all the panic, but it was contagious. As I prepared to walk through the blasting wind and snow in only my suit the other day people were alarmed. I then reminded them that it wasn’t uncommon for me to ride a motorcycle in below zero temperatures. So what was going on and why was Matt Bevin attacked for suggesting that we were weakening our youth with our fetal position reaction to every modern-day danger? The school closings and call offs from work had nothing to do with safety but everything to do with politics, with obeying the temperamental mother earth and setting people’s minds onto the topic of climate change as something to be feared, not conquered.

I was alive back then in 1977 in Cincinnati when the Ohio River froze and people could walk across it from Cincinnati into Covington. I was one of them and at the time was a student during that period where for something like 39 straight days from January 4th until mid-February there was snow on the ground and the temperatures often plummeted to -25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. There were a lot of call offs for school that had to be made up later due to heavy snow, but on most days we all went to school, waited for the bus and were exposed to arctic temperatures for long periods of time and nobody died. The older people back then would have thought it unheard of to cry and whine that temperatures were too cold. Most of us had relatives who were farmers back then and they didn’t call off work, the continued to milk the cows, and perform other outside duties in spite of the cold. Toughness was an expectation, not an exception. Matt Bevin’s attitude was common.

These temperatures just under zero for a few hours at the end of January were not a big deal, certainly not enough to have schools call off the way they did days in advance. And the adults who called off work because it was “too cold” outside were doing so as an excuse to get out of work using the public sentiment as a shield to protect them from the expectations of productive output. I would call it a criminal endeavor to rob people of above the line thinking by using the potential for tragedy to lure them into below the line cowardness. I did my walking outside in my suit happily with snow drifts swelling around me and the blast of harsh wind ripping at my face refreshing. It feels good to tame the elements and to spit in the face of mother nature. She doesn’t control my life, I control hers. It is the human who invented transportation and heating to deflect the effects of mother nature. It is not our task to obey her. We are to dominate her.

But in teaching kids to yield to every little danger and elemental concern, we are teaching them to be future panic driven imbeciles looking for every excuse in the world not to do something. And Matt Bevin is right, we shouldn’t be doing it. The goal isn’t to teach kids to be tough, but to teach them to obey the elements of the world, to climb back into the primal concerns of society where the big government chieftains would be called upon to appease Mother Nature with sacrifices so that below zero temperatures might abate our concerns is the objective of the political left. The sacrifice of course is the productivity of our nation, instead of having a hell or high-water approach to problem solving we are to stick our fingers in the air and determine if it is safe or not, and then to seek government opinion as to whether or not we conduct business. Only when the professionals determined that it was safe to go to school or to attend work would we do so. Those seeds are being planted in our youth as we speak and its pretty ridiculous.

I am one of those people who does whatever I want in spite of the weather. If I want to go on a picnic with my family and its pouring rain, I do it anyway. I find it pathetic that there are so many people these days who use handicaps as a reason for not doing things such as weather or personal afflictions. I can remember a time that I scheduled a romantic getaway to Niagara Falls with my wife and I had just the day before our proposed departure really hurt my back trying to lift a 600-pound tool that was falling off a cart that I didn’t want to see damaged by striking the floor. Yes, I saved the tool and the floor but I really messed up my back. I could hardly walk. To make matters worse, a snow storm had hit and it was going to be a tough drive from Cincinnati to Buffalo, New York under those conditions. Guess what, we went anyway. I toughed through it and we walked miles and miles once we eventually reached our destination, and I enjoyed it in spite of the pain and the terrible weather. It’s quite a thing for me to not yield to mother nature. I don’t give her command of my life and I don’t respect people who do. Because below the line people often use the excuse of danger and insistence of safety to avoid doing things they are too lazy, or cowardly to pursue, and that is the danger of teaching young people to behave in such a way by calling off schools just because temperatures are cold.

Schools and businesses are more adapt today than they were in 1977 to deal with the cold. Heaters are much more reliable, power lines more stable, cars far, far better. People lived through it back then and they can certainly live through it better now. But to my observation, because I have lived through it, people are weaker, they are certainly softer and they are much less prepared than even people were a few years ago to deal with any kind of crises. I have noticed in days of heavy snow that people are much dumber than even two years ago driving slower and with much less confidence. That is because of the way their media has prepared them for tragedy. They have been taught to yield to every danger and to seek help from government over every little thing, they have lost the autonomy of personal needs and desires against the wishes of the dumb science of global temperament. And Matt Bevin is not alone in his assessment. I agree with him 100%

Rich Hoffman
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