Don't call it a "natural disaster"

It wasn't an act of God, either.

Mayfield, Kentucky. Or is it Joplin or Nacogdoches?

The death toll is rising after a series of massive tornadoes ripped through six states — Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi Missouri, Tennessee — late Friday and early Saturday. If you go here, about 11 clicks in you’ll get a taste of the devastation from images shot by a drone in Mayfield, Kentucky.

The photos and the stories look like my own Joplin, Mo., where in May 2011 an EF5 (the biggest kind) tornado killed 162 people (though that is a fungible number as suicides followed the winds). The tornado also blew a third of the town to thunder.

I went out to volunteer. I flew into Springfield, Mo., about 70 miles east of Joplin, and rented a car while mentally preparing myself for what I’d see.

Silly me. I was not prepared. My tour through Tornado Hell started with a huge piece of metal ripped from a truck and twisted around a highway sign right about Sarcoxie, Mo., on my way in. I actually pulled over to look at it. Joplin itself was a moonscape, a (though I loathe “trigger warnings,” the next link is a video that might be tough to watch) town stripped of all its markers. A shell of a house just off Main Street became a bit of a shrine. People who’d come from all over the world signed the remaining walls and floors.

Joplin’s survivors are still recovering, and not just physically. A high school friend took to Facebook on Sunday to write about losing everything that day, and then dealing with unhelpful Missouri Highway patrolmen. She’s more than a decade from the devastation, she said, but the wound is made fresh by seeing other people standing out in front of what used to be their home, preparing to resume a life they didn’t plan for or expect. There are people (and not just in Missouri) who won’t look at the Kentucky pictures. Why would they? They’ve seen this devastation already, where street signs are gone, trees are stripped of their bark, and buildings aren’t even a pile of rubble because the rubble was blown into the next county.

I tried to explain to my Yankee husband why more people didn’t go into their cellar at the first warnings of a big blow like this. I don’t begrudge him for asking. I’ve wondered, myself, about people who insist on living on a fault line.

But if you grow up in Tornado Alley, tornado watches and warnings — and now, the level threes, tornado alerts — are so common, you’d never come out of your basement if you paid attention to each one. Science has not yet advanced to the point of being able to predict precisely when that nasty little tail will drop from a cloud and take your garage — or worse.

And so yesterday, just before it hit, people were Christmas shopping and cutting their trees and hanging lights on porches that aren’t there today. You live your life and hope for the best (or, if you’re like my family, you cling to an angry God in the hope that your name doesn’t come up in heaven’s next discussion about weather targets).

But we can’t blame God for this, can we? Storms have gotten increasingly fierce, and that’s not on God. Nor are our warmer winters, which create conditions ripe for such storms. That’s on us, and our need for clear-cutting forests and fossil fuels.

I would entertain arguments about humanity’s role in climate change, but I can’t hear you for the winds.

These most recent photos are devastating — and, for people who’ve witnessed actual weather carnage — they’re haunting, as well. But we’d better get used to it. This is our future, and not just in Tornado Alley.