First, we were told that these Texans were going to “stare down” this hurricane. Who would decide to do such a thing? I might have laughed at the idea, but I wouldn’t want to appear to be insensitive. (I’ve learned an ugly life lesson about that. Just for the record, I didn’t laugh at anyone then, and I’m not laughing at anyone now! The conclusion drawn from the circumstances then were absurd and counter-intuitive, and the conclusions some people drew in this circumstance are, too. But I’m not laughing at anyone. I’m not even going to say “See? I told you so!”) Several thousand people refused to evacuate when the authorities told them to go. In this country, the authorities can not force them to go, so they stayed.

Then, just when the authorities predicted a hurricane was going to hit the coast of Texas, what do you suppose happened? A hurricane hits the coast of Texas! Isn’t that amazing? Not really, the satellite pictures were on the Internet and the television. Big chunks of Houston collapsed before the fierce power of Hurricane Ike.

And as Ike headed on inland, the rescue teams went into the area they had asked to evacuate before the storm and fished out the thousands of people that were going to tough it out and “stare down” the hurricane. If you have been following the news, you already know all this. Entire buildings are completely missing from their foundations now. Anyone and anything that may have been in those buildings would be gone, too. We have seen the newsreels before. So where am I going with this sequence of events?

These people who chose to stay totally and completely underestimated the awesome power and force of this hurricane. It’s easy to understand how that could be. The Global Warming gang has told us that we (and our SUVs) are collectively big enough and strong enough to affect changes in the climate of our entire planet. So confronting a little severe weather ought to be much less daunting than changing the overall climate. In truth, there ought to be a couple of thousand new converts to the idea that Mankind is not strong enough to contribute to any permanent change of our planet. Every day, the oceans churn thousands of gallons of natural “oil spills” back into the brine. Thousands of acres of forests burn without permanently altering the atmosphere or the climate. Volcanoes and hurricanes, and other natural phenomenon, ignore us and our puny little ideas about the planet as they play out their natural forces. And always, after each encounter, the planet cleans itself up. We can not stop these forces, and we can not help the planet clean itself up afterwards. We are passengers, and nothing more.

All that said, I don’t believe that we are at liberty to foul our surroundings. But that has much more to do with rudeness to each other, not because the planet is so delicate or sensitive. I saw something recently, the Farmer’s Almanac I believe, that said we were about to enter a cycle of global cooling, based on ocean currents and something or other, yadda yadda. I would say that we could reverse this trend by going out and turning on our SUVs and letting them run an extra hour or two every day. But with gas prices at these levels, who could afford that? However, I would simply be being sarcastic anyway. And someone might think that I was laughing at them. I've learned about that. It gets ugly.