The polar vortex 2019 seems to have moved on, leaving behind substantial chunks of the population to whinge and whine and mewl about the dangers of cold weather, to wring hands about the devastating toll on less advantaged members of society, and give thanks for the provident closures and wise choices made to stay indoors.

I wish it had stayed much longer.

In fact, I wish we had a three or four month long sub-arctic freeze right down to the Florida Keys.

It would improve our circumstances.

The first benefit is a dusting of that fuzzy 9-12-01 feeling, when you smile at neighbors and everyone turns up the civic helpfulness several notches. Strangers help strangers jump a battery or push a car out of snow, kids get sent out to help the elderly carry groceries, and so on. All the nice things we should be doing anyway but slack off because tropical temperatures in the 60’s and above have addled the citizenmalia, a small gland in the brain responsible for civic behavior, known to whither at warmer climes.

The second major benefit of sustained sub-zero temperatures is a great clarification of the intentions and motivations of those around us. Like “time,” the “cold” is a physical fact dressed up like an excuse. “I didn’t have time to write a thank you note,” really means “It wasn’t important to me. I don’t care that much.” Cold weather is like lack of time. “It was too cold to go out,” means “I don’t want to take simple pragmatic steps to endure a minor amount of discomfort in order to do something I said I wanted to do.”

I recently encouraged a friend in New York city to attend a function I thought he’d enjoy, he said he’d like to but it was too cold. I pointed out that if an ex-lover from out-of-town wound up at a hotel on the other side of Manhattan, called up from her room and said she was feeling lonely, he would have raced naked through snow drifts to get over there. The point was conceded.

Cold inhibits aggressive behavior, it’s the reason psychiatric wards are kept like meat lockers. Violent crime drops during extreme cold the same way it spikes on hot summer weekends in Chicago. You’d think someone meditating an act as serious as murder or an armed car-jacking would be more deterred by the possibility of being killed or caught, but no, it’s the hassle of layering that gets in the way. A sad lack of resolution even for a thug, but good for society at large.

The Marxist crowd will reduce everything to distribution and quality of parkas; we’ll take up that point later but let’s not be led off by it. Tens of millions of people live in countries with long bitter winters and they get around just fine swaddled in economy-grade synthetics. Americans a hundred years ago were out and about in the same temperatures or worse in clothing no better than today’s homeless have. I spent a day in Beijing one January that was 5 degrees F. With enough gloves and scarves people were whizzing around on motorbikes and bicycles and getting by quite well, they didn’t look like they’d done their shopping at The North Face or REI.

I shivered through the winter of 1996-7 in South Korea where everyone seemed to have the same medium-weight no-name jackets. No heat on the buses, no central heat in many restaurants, no hot water in the showers where I lived, and after midnight people wound up in orange street-side tents to drink and eat around kerosene heaters while the snow and wind tore at the tent like an enraged ghost and a Gogol-like walk home awaited. We all made it. Hikes up mountains found monks living at even colder temperatures with even less heat, wearing even thinner clothes.

Wind chills reaching 50 below zero are not inherently dangerous the way a swimming pool is not an existential threat: it depends on the level of common sense applied. Human adaptability is always under-rated. Last week in Chicago on the first day of -20 F temps, most establishments were closed. On the second day of exactly the same temperatures, businesses started re-opening and people ventured out more. If we had the polar vortex for months at a time, we’d be out living normally in it, except better because the lightly motivated and easily discouraged would still be holed up in their hiburnacula of excuses.

My wish for a new Ice Age is not born of any indifference to the homeless, in fact it is just the cold we have recently experienced that brings to the fore the utter moral absurdity that they are there in the first place.

The homeless are unlucky or unable, but for sure they are not generally irrational. As the “warming buses” and Salvation Army volunteers made their rounds trying to cull people out of improvised shelters, many refused with solid reason: they couldn’t bring their stuff with them which they depend upon to survive. Homeless shelters have bed bugs and theft is common. At 5am they get put back on the streets, sans stuff and with bugs.

In fact, not a single homeless person froze to death in Chicago during the latest vortex, despite the claim (which we are getting to) that it was “too dangerous” for the rest of us to carry on. The gradation of socially acceptable absurdity we’re left with is:
1. 20 F, pretty cold but a wealthy society can’t find a standing solution for people facing a shelter emergency, despite knowing that a good number of such people lack either mental or material resources to help themselves.
2. 15 F, ok, getting colder. Chicago has the gross domestic product of Switzerland but clearly you like it better under the bridge so what can we do about it?
3. 5 F come on people, we’ve got hot coffee at the shelter, don’t embarrass us by having frozen-stiff bodies added to our national reputation.
4.—15 F enough is enough! Will you just come in already?
Point being, if people sane and rational enough to survive a night under the bridge in Arctic conditions aren’t willing to take up an offer of help, perhaps the solution we’re offering is far too short of any help at all. Were a safe, warm, permanent place on offer free of bugs and with some basic security, I doubt many would pass it up. This is no comment on the brave volunteers out trying their best, but on the resources allowed them. One can sense already the Protestant reflex: “But if we build nicer shelters for the homeless we’ll just get more takers grifting three hots and a cot.” Again, a night in a tent city during the polar vortex is proof of remarkable adaptability, perseverance, and self-preservation, just the sort of people who deserve a better shake.

Now we come to the safety of children, the most absolute and sacred value held dear to the American heart, school-shootings and child beauty pageants notwithstanding.

The decisions to close Chicago Public Schools, affecting 300,000 students and their families, involves another terrible moral calculus. School might be the warmest place many kids get to in a day, and the only place a hot meal is to be had. On the other hand all the little dears will have to trudge out through severe cold, wait for buses, and if anything happens to anyone there will be holy hell to pay. Because children.

The very kids most needing to get to school are the ones most likely not to have the appropriate jackets and such to get there. The cold brings to the fore a morally absurd question: where should poor children be frozen, at home or on the way to school? Were we graced with months and months of polar vortex cold, we might come around to considering the benefits of not freezing kids anywhere. We might also have a fit of honesty and consider that what we’re really balancing is discomfort for middle class children versus leaving the poor ones cold, hungry, and possibly unattended at home.

The entire issue is snowed, as it were, by the endless blizzard of safetyism that has moved over our continent like a Jupiterean red spot and seems to be a permanent climactic feature. Any risk or discomfort whatsoever, as long as it applies to mostly white middle class people, is intolerable and must be met with measures and resources that know no bounds.

Middle class children presumably have all the winter gear they need, it would be a much easier solution to give jackets to the poor ones and have everyone come to school, oh-my-cheeks-hurt-and-nostrils-are-frozen be damned. Extreme cold has a way of forcing even the daftest of parents to rise to the occasion, they would freak and fret but there would not be frozen fingers and noses piling up in the corners of emergency rooms.

Witness the Safety First! pile-on given the governor of Kentucky, who would have engendered less scorn had he been filmed eating a steak carved off a flank of Cecil the Lion. Now, Governor Matt Bevin is not a fellow I’d share bed bugs with in any willing circumstance but he’s correct that Americans are soft. This fact is unavoidably true to anyone with a stamp or two on their passport that has spent time outside a cosseted resort: around the world, people with fractions of our material wealth happily tolerate life’s tribulations and do so without risk to life or limb.

Yet the avuncular Al Roker piled on: “These are kids who are going to be in subzero wind chill. No, cancel school. Stop it.” As if a point had been made. Subzero wind chill equals no going outside because why exactly? We’re going to encourage them to strip to their skivvies and face the wind uncovered for 30 minutes? Even five minutes is enough for frostbite, the meteorological nags drone endlessly. Yes, but the first ten seconds of that experience is quite painful, what functioning human stands there slowly loosing a limb in spite of searing torment? Five minutes is enough time to lightly roast a hand, but most of us drop a hot pan handle much earlier.

Safetyism requires the infantilization of those being “protected,” but as with the homeless, children are sold far short. A toddler was recently pulled out of the North Carolina woods after three days with no food or water — not an experiment we want to run willingly but it shows children are not as fragile as adults think they are. If you dumped a truck load of clothing in a parking lot and gave kids some boxes of matches, come back in a few days and they’d be well-wrapped up and huddling around fires.

Peak safetyism was reached with the Kentucky Education Association, tweeting: “We will always support decisions made for the health & safety of Kentucky’s children. Always.” It’s a capital case of virtue signaling if ever there was one. Who’s going to come against health and safety for children? And aren’t people in favor of health and safety so caring and wise, deserving of our admiration?

Adults failing to teach children how to make it through a cold day is not, in fact, acting in the interest of their health and safety. It’s shirking a chance to practice common sense preparation and mental grit, which children have both of in spades until the adults in their life stamp it out of them. Presumably the adults who care so much about health and safety (Always!) don’t shove their kids out the door half-naked. So if they got off Twitter and bundled Junior off to school properly, they would be actually doing something for health and safety rather than advertising how important it is, or calling the governor a “nitwit”. Nitwit he is, but sending a child to face the next seventy or so winters of their life unable to cope with normally occurring phenomena gives us a lot of future nitwits to deal with.

So I hope the polar vortex comes back, and often. I wish we had several every winter and that Southerners unable to migrate north have their local swamp/sagebrush/desert environs frozen to a crisp on a regular basis. This is born of no unkindness to the allegedly vulnerable in society, rather the opposite: that we recognize and promote the adaptability and strength of all persons. Bitter cold forces us to reach out to one another: when your car won’t start after midnight, the race, gender, and orientation of the person who stops with jumper cables is of no consequence.

Let it be cold for far longer, that lakes and ponds freeze into howling snow-whipped hellscapes. Doors will jam, tires will deflate, and our attention will be drawn away from the health n’ safety blatherskites and towards concrete issue of real importance: did I leave the water trickling? Does my child have mittens that fit over gloves? Maybe I should send them across the street to check on the neighbor?

Remember, we did not go to the moon because it was warm there.

Daniel Sherman is an entrepreneur in importation and distribution. He divides his time between Italy and Chicago. He is developing a book, Good Enough, for adolescents on the topic of ethics.

Photo credit: Daniel Sherman