Arrogance

 In an attempt to disregard the emphasis we might all be pouring onto holiday cheer, I would like to bring up the case of a particular street in Kentucky: Moss Creek Avenue in Bowling Green. It was here that a tornado touched down last week, killing eleven people. Seven of them were children. Two of those were infants. 

What I am about to do is wrap this tragedy up in a great big bag with all of the others that have descended on our world over the past couple years. Tornadoes are not new, but their severity and some say their frequency has increased. Scientists are slow to connect this trend to climate change, but I would imagine that there are plenty of folks on the ground in Kentucky who would be happy to name a culprit. Fifty tornadoes across eight states over the course of a weekend. More than one hundred people have been confirmed dead, and another hundred remain unaccounted for. 

If we use round numbers, we could compare those two hundred lives to the two hundred Americans lost to gun violence over the same two days. It was over the past weekend that the US death toll from COVID-19 crossed the eight hundred thousand mark. 

That bag is getting pretty full, but are these events in any way connected beyond my morbid fascination? 

I will now suggest that arrogance is at the heart of all of this suffering. An unwillingness to allow for things bigger than us humans in the nature of things. Weather, for example shouldn't be ignored. For example, there was a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky where employees were threatened with termination if they left their shifts early. To flee the coming funnel cloud. Eight people died when the building was hit. Dozens more had to be rescued from the debris that was their former place of employment. 

Meanwhile, across America, more than a thousand people continue to die each week from a pandemic that has been raging for nearly two years. And there are people who still want to argue about its existence. Or wearing a mask. Or getting a vaccine. People are leaving their jobs rather than submitting to such outrageous suggestions. 

Which tends to make everyone a lot more tense. Which does little to increase the peace in a country with more guns than people. 

And the beat goes on. Sleep tight, America.