So last week it was a little on the cold side. We found ourselves in the grips of the dreaded POLAR VORTEX!!!!!! (whatever that is) and local temperatures dipped below zero at times. Of course it was cold in other parts of the country too, the effects of which resulted in much weeping and gnashing of teeth south of the forty-fifth parallel.
The temperature dipped to lows I haven’t seen in recent memory but was far from the coldest in my lifetime. Overnight, the coldest reading I had was fifteen below, which is cold enough, but the daytime temperatures hovered around zero. Given the fact that it is January, zero comes as no surprise.
Wind chill must be factored in because we need a statistic that makes things sound worse than they actually are. Saying “it’s four-hundred below with the wind chill!” makes us sound tougher than we actually are, but many of us need these extreme survival feathers in our cap.
It may come as no surprise that school was cancelled during this Polar-Vortex-windchill-o-doom-o-rama, but it did surprise me, sort of.
Not long ago it would have been unheard of to cancel school due to cold temperatures. J.T. Marconi, my disc-jockey friend, would have to tell newcomers to the area to stop calling the radio station to find out if school was cancelled because we don’t cancel school due to the cold up here.
When I hear of cancellations due to cold temperatures my knee-jerk reaction is to think that kids aren’t as tough as they used to be, but after some careful thought I have come to realize that it is really the current batch of parents of schoolchildren who have grown soft. They aren’t going to send poor, little Precious out there in the big, bad cold. No, poor, little Precious needs to be coddled and brought up to believe that they will never have to deal with weather extremes on a personal level.
Parents in days past were fully aware of the region they lived in and they knew—years or even decades—in advance that it gets cold here in the winter. It was no surprise to them that the temperatures were going to be sub-zero at times and they made their children wear clothing that was appropriate for such weather. Life in the north involves some serious cold and parents accepted this fact and planned accordingly.
I am sure that someone, somewhere during my childhood developed a case of frostbite while waiting for a bus, but I can tell you that it never happened to anyone in any of my schools from kindergarten through my senior year of high school. Not a once during that time was school cancelled due to cold weather, and the weather was certainly colder than what mean, old Mr. Polar Vortex brought us this time around.
I have heard some people say that the buses and the cars of parents who drive their kids to school may not start in these cold temperatures and when I hear such things I want to say don’t even go there. I grew up around heavy trucks and equipment and years ago it could be a challenge to get some of it started, but we had the technology to do it. Occasionally a bus or two would be running late, but they always got the kids to school.
And cars these days start without effort as long as they have a decent battery. Turn the key and it runs, that’s it. Years ago you had to go through a cold-weather starting process of setting the choke and giving it just enough gas to get the engine to fire, and if you did one little thing wrong you would flood the carburetor and blow your one shot at getting the thing to run because now you have killed the battery. So unless you are still driving a 1971 AMC Matador the whole argument of cars not starting as an excuse to not go to school kind of goes right out the window.
I’m guessing that modern parents—with their lives lacking in real adversity (after all, they didn’t need to walk five miles to school through three feet of snow, uphill both ways like their parents did)—need to turn something that was once a mundane fact of life, such as cold weather, into a force of evil from which their children must be bravely protected.
Waye Braver can be contacted on Facebook or by e-mail at waye@braverinstitute.com
Visit the Braver Institute at www.braverinsitute.com
The temperature dipped to lows I haven’t seen in recent memory but was far from the coldest in my lifetime. Overnight, the coldest reading I had was fifteen below, which is cold enough, but the daytime temperatures hovered around zero. Given the fact that it is January, zero comes as no surprise.
Wind chill must be factored in because we need a statistic that makes things sound worse than they actually are. Saying “it’s four-hundred below with the wind chill!” makes us sound tougher than we actually are, but many of us need these extreme survival feathers in our cap.
It may come as no surprise that school was cancelled during this Polar-Vortex-windchill-o-doom-o-rama, but it did surprise me, sort of.
Not long ago it would have been unheard of to cancel school due to cold temperatures. J.T. Marconi, my disc-jockey friend, would have to tell newcomers to the area to stop calling the radio station to find out if school was cancelled because we don’t cancel school due to the cold up here.
When I hear of cancellations due to cold temperatures my knee-jerk reaction is to think that kids aren’t as tough as they used to be, but after some careful thought I have come to realize that it is really the current batch of parents of schoolchildren who have grown soft. They aren’t going to send poor, little Precious out there in the big, bad cold. No, poor, little Precious needs to be coddled and brought up to believe that they will never have to deal with weather extremes on a personal level.
Parents in days past were fully aware of the region they lived in and they knew—years or even decades—in advance that it gets cold here in the winter. It was no surprise to them that the temperatures were going to be sub-zero at times and they made their children wear clothing that was appropriate for such weather. Life in the north involves some serious cold and parents accepted this fact and planned accordingly.
I am sure that someone, somewhere during my childhood developed a case of frostbite while waiting for a bus, but I can tell you that it never happened to anyone in any of my schools from kindergarten through my senior year of high school. Not a once during that time was school cancelled due to cold weather, and the weather was certainly colder than what mean, old Mr. Polar Vortex brought us this time around.
I have heard some people say that the buses and the cars of parents who drive their kids to school may not start in these cold temperatures and when I hear such things I want to say don’t even go there. I grew up around heavy trucks and equipment and years ago it could be a challenge to get some of it started, but we had the technology to do it. Occasionally a bus or two would be running late, but they always got the kids to school.
And cars these days start without effort as long as they have a decent battery. Turn the key and it runs, that’s it. Years ago you had to go through a cold-weather starting process of setting the choke and giving it just enough gas to get the engine to fire, and if you did one little thing wrong you would flood the carburetor and blow your one shot at getting the thing to run because now you have killed the battery. So unless you are still driving a 1971 AMC Matador the whole argument of cars not starting as an excuse to not go to school kind of goes right out the window.
I’m guessing that modern parents—with their lives lacking in real adversity (after all, they didn’t need to walk five miles to school through three feet of snow, uphill both ways like their parents did)—need to turn something that was once a mundane fact of life, such as cold weather, into a force of evil from which their children must be bravely protected.
Waye Braver can be contacted on Facebook or by e-mail at waye@braverinstitute.com
Visit the Braver Institute at www.braverinsitute.com
This piece first appeared in the January 16th, 2014 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: www.pioneertribune.com
As one of those children of days past who stood at a bus stop after walking the length of at least 4 city blocks in the freezing bitter cold and wind, I am glad people finally got smart enough not to send children out in it anymore.
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Spoken like a true modern parent.
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