By Sherry Pasquarello,WWH/CJE

I must admit to being scared of the storm that had been predicted these past few days. I never really was this upset before. Oh, I always took the advised precautions but I really wasn’t antsy. For most of my life Pittsburgh was a little protected area, surrounded by hills and more subjected to flooding than anything else. With three major rivers and dozens of small streams and creeks we are used to it.

Over the past fifteen or so years we have seen weather events like nothing any of us were familiar with. Huge storms, straight line winds that rip up hundred year old trees as if they were weeds and yes, even tornadoes. I would have bet that there would be kangaroos hopping down Wood Street before there would be a tornado on Mount Washington. We have strange seasons merging into one another and then retreating, and so on.

To me, at the age of sixty one, I don’t need to be told that something is not right. The thing of it is. It’s a good to be concerned about the weather and its power to damage and turn lives upside down. It’s good to take precautions for predicted weather all throughout our country. It’s really foolish and shortsighted and frankly, cowardly to give up our freedoms and our American way of life to the power hungry among us that use a fear of terrorists to turn us into the very types that do seek to harm us. We are far more likely to have our lives torn apart by climate change than by some fanatic with a martyr wish.

So for me, I’ll watch the weather and I’ll check on all of those AMERICANS in power that grasp for more and more and I will fight to hold on to the freedoms we still have and fight even more to reclaim those that were stolen from us with tales of monsters under our beds.

Peace