Weather Forecasting
It is the material for the conversation of board chairman
and bored cleaning woman,
of young and old, of the bright, the dull, the rich and the poor.
As if this basic coin of conversation needed to be gilded,
the average American constantly reads about the weather
in his newspapers and magazines,
listens to regular forecasts of it on the radio
and watches while some TV prophet milks it for cuteness
on the evening news.
Since the weather is to man what the waters are to fish,
his preoccupation with it serves a unique purpose,
constituting a social phenomenon all its own.
Far from arising merely to pass the time or bridge a silence,
"weathertalk," as it might be called, is a sort of code
by which people confirm and salute the sense of community
they discover in the face of the weather's implacable influence.
Inspired by exceptional weather,
otherwise immutable strangers
suddenly find themselves in communion.
As victims, people hate to cancel a picnic on account of rain,
and yet they often cheer
when the weather brings human activity to an abrupt stop.
Most feel that the weather indeed affects their moods.
If man sees the weather differently
according to his circumstance,
healthy fear works at the hub of his obsession with it.
Through human history,
weather has altered the march of events
and caused some mighty cataclysms.
Every year brings fresh reminders
of the weather's power over human life
and events in the form of horrifying tornadoes,
hurricanes and floods.
No wonder, then,
that man's great dream has been some day to control the weather.
With computers on tap and electronic eyes in the sky,
modern man has thus come far in dealing with the weather,
alternately his enemy and benefactor,
yet man's difficulty today is not too far removed
from that of his remote ancestors.
For all the advances of scientific forecasting,
in spite of the thousands of daily bulletins and advisories
that get flashed about,
the weather is still ultimately unstable and unpredictable.
Man's dream of controlling it is still just that-a dream.
The very idea of control, in fact,
raises enormous and troublesome questions.
The vision of scheduled weather
also raises ambiguous feelings
among the world's billions of weather fans
and poses at least one irresistible question:
If weather were as predictable as holidays and eclipses,
what in the world would everyone talk about?