Tornadoes and Idiots

There has been a lot of stress in our house lately concerning tornadoes. We have had a rash of pretty severe thunderstorms complete with high winds, hail, heavy rain, thunder, lightning, and tornadoes. Mr. Laura does not handle these well at all. On Friday night as another storm was ramping up and Mr. Laura was becoming increasingly distressed, I decided to google some information on South Carolina and tornadoes. I found a website that contains a database of all tornadoes and their corresponding strength on the Fujita scale since the 1950's. South Carolina has never had a F4 or F5 tornado and, at least according to the database, no fatalities have ever been a direct result of a tornado in these parts. Mr. Laura was feeling reassured and we began to play around on the website checking out other states' statistics. Soon the rest of the nestlings had gathered around my laptop. Mr. Edwards noticed that there were links to video clips of tornadoes. Soon we were checking out lots and lots of storm chaser videos in the midwest. The enormity and power of the tornadoes were both frightening and impressive.

Many of the clips had audio as well. They were usually the voices of early twenty-something sounding men. The words "dude", "awesome", and "cool" were repeated over and over. Other comments included "Hurry up man, we are going to miss it", "I want someone to take my picture with it coming towards me", "Oh my god! It just sucked up that house", and "We're getting close. There is debris hitting our car".

The audio led to questions from the nestlings as to who was filming the tornadoes?, who was making them chase the tornadoes?, do they get paid to do this?, and why would anyone want to do this?

I explained that many of them were probably not being paid, but instead got a thrill out of being that close to such a powerful force of nature. The nestlings were not convinced. They also wanted to know why it seemed that no women were chasing the tornadoes. I made some attempt at explaining that, in general, as boys get older and go through puberty that they experience feelings of invincibility and immortality and therefore are willing to take more and more risks than they may be willing to take at other times in their life.

At this point Mr. Edwards asked, "You mean we are going to act like idiots when we're 20"?