Newsflash: Snow in Minnesota

Well, it took a weather event to get me cranked up again. Over the past week, Minnesota has been subjected to what seems like a real winter. Not the wimpy 45 degrees in January winter we were having, but winter as it was lived here and in the rest of the North for most of my adult life. Rumors of global warming notwithstanding, to judge from the recent media coverage, you would think this was a major life event. The litany of catastrophic predictions has been endless. And the "B" word (for blizzard) has actually been dusted off and used publicly.

Now before the heavens open and the great firmament runneth over, I think we need to get a collective grip. A foot of snow is a foot of snow. A pain in the neck to travel through and dangerous if you somehow ignore the reality that you aren't going to be able to breeze through town. But, please, it's snow. Not frogs, locusts and other forms of pestilence. Not avian flu or Hong Kong hangnails. Snow. We live at the 45th parallel here in Minnesota and we have no right to expect otherwise at this time of year, even if it is the first of March. Yes, the month is coming in like a big old cranky lion, but that doesn't mean it's going to eat your young.

So, tomorrow morning, I will walk outside and do what others who have lived in the upper Midwest have done for decades -- move the snow out of my way so I can get where I need to go. It's not hard. The physics are actually pretty easy to understand. And it really isn't worthy of endless dire predictions of the end of the world as we know it. It's just snow.