The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

A question for readers. When you were a little kid, do you recall looking at a globe of the world or a map and placing yourself in physical context?

I have a clear recollection of thinking of myself as from the city of Birmingham, in Jefferson County, in the state of Alabama, in the United States of America. This is in the Western Hemisphere, on Planet Earth, the third planet out from the sun in the Milkyway Galaxy, somewhere in a vast and expanding, infinite universe.

I know other people who have had this experience, because I’ve asked my friends about this before. But according to those I’ve asked, they figure most people have never thought of themselves in this way, because that would take the capacity for abstract thinking, something that is beyond the intellectual capacity of most people who measure an average of 100 on an Intelligence Quotient or IQ test.

The reason I ask today is because there’s this sensational little Twitter story going around on social media about some alleged “research” showing that people in Alabama can’t find themselves on a map.

.@spann Fireside Chat: Many people can't find themselves on a map. pic.twitter.com/IEzUXBNhD5

— ABC 33/40 News (@abc3340) April 14, 2019

This is such big news that The Washington Post, which seems to have a particular obsession with all things about Alabama these days for reasons I won’t go into, produced a story about this on the front page of their national news website.

“When severe weather threatens, meteorologists use maps to show where storms are located and where they’re headed. They want their audiences to know if they’re in the path of the storm,” laments Jason Samenow, the Washington Post’s weather editor and the so-called “Capital Weather Gang’s” chief meteorologist.

“But research has shown a substantial percentage of people can’t place themselves on a map, a potential problem if a tornado or violent storm is bearing down on their location,” he says.

But wait. Follow the link to this so-called research and it’s just a little news story in Alabama’s Al dot com news site owned by the Newhouse family, which also owns all the big, dying papers in the state in the major cities of Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville.

A woman in DeKalb County, the home of former judge and U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, asked seven people if they could find themselves on a map with the county lines only in the state. Only three people could do it.

This is not enough of a sample size to actually be called research, but here it is.

Many Alabamians can’t find themselves on a map, and that’s dangerous

The chief meteorologist for the ABC affiliate in Birmingham who addressed this problem is James Spann, the same weather man who a few years ago got famous for saying there’s no such thing as man-made global warming, only “cyclical” weather patterns that come and go. Because of that, and things he’s done since, he literally has over 400,000 followers on Twitter. He did this sensational tweet in what he called a “fireside chat” this past Sunday.

But wait. There’s no fire. A fireside chat is what President Franklin Roosevelt did back in the 1930s on the radio. But FDR was sitting by an actual fire when he did it and you could hear the crackling of the burning wood on the air. Where’s James Spann’s fire?

The Post gushes all over Spann, giving him credit for not “condescending” to readers by referencing his own intellectual limitations. I swear I’m not making this up. He’s saying people in Alabama can’t find where they live on a map and he’s not condescending?

“Listen, we don’t expect people to be geographers or radar meteorologists … there are a lot of things I’m not good at,” he said. “But during severe weather, what do we use? Maps. We have learned a large percentage of people in our state and in many states cannot find themselves on a map.”

Then the friendly, humble weatherman goes on to explain just how “pervasive” the problem is, according to the paper put out by mostly Ivy Leaguers, many of whom probably paid big bucks to get into Harvard or Yale, in what we now know has been a scam by the rich for some time.

But to continue this silly story, Spann goes on.

“If I were to give you a blank map with no labels, no highways, just county lines and state lines, could you draw a dot within 50 miles of your house? We’ve seen some studies which show about 85 percent of the population cannot.”

Of course there was no link to any of this so-called research, so it’s hard to judge if it’s true or not.

“I understand with phones, it’s cool, you tell the phone, ‘I want to go to wherever,’ and it just gives you turn-by-turn directions … but you need some basic map skills to help us communicate some critical severe-weather information,” Spann goes on. “It would really help if you could identify the county that you live in and the counties adjacent to you.”

Enough of that. While there’s apparently no actual research to back this up, I suspect there is some truth to it. So I would humbly like to make a larger point.

But I don’t want to be condescending to readers, especially since I suspect my readers are some of the smartest people on the planet anyway, even if some of them just happen to be from Alabama and didn’t buy their way into an Ivy League university.

The facts are these.

Most people have an Intelligence Quotient or IQ of 100, which is considered average. A majority of people don’t have the intellectual capacity to think abstractly, a subject I address in a chapter in my book.

Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again

Many people in rural America, including rural Alabama, probably can’t afford to pay for cable television, if cable is even available where they live. In rural areas, people who want to get cable TV must pay for satellite TV, which costs about as much or more than cable. Many poor people simply can’t afford this.

The vast majority of these people probably don’t realize that broadcast television can still be accessed for free, if you can simply afford to buy a digital antenna for your HD TV.

In my own experience, since I figured out a few years ago that cable TV is mostly a ripoff and costs way more than it’s worth, I picked up a digital broadcast antenna for the $150 HD TV in my media camper van for $79 at Radio Shack. In a metro area like Washington, D.C., you can pick up over 80 channels, including all the network and local news, multiple public television stations and quite a few movie channels. More recently, shopping at Best Buy, I picked up a brand new 32-inch Insignia TV for $100.

In the house in Mobile, where I’ve spent that past five winters, last year I picked up a 38-inch HD TV for under $300. Just this week I replaced the digital antenna on the outside of the house for $50.

So for about $150, anyone could have an HD TV and a broadcast antenna and then they could watch the local weather when it’s bad and find out what’s going on – if they can find themselves on a weather map.

Maybe James Spann should spend a little time explaining this to people. Oh, but wait. This might piss off the cable television companies and their advertisers.

Anyone within 60 miles of a broadcast television station repeater can get broadcast TV for free, including weather reports about approaching hurricanes and tornadoes.

But this still assumes that people care enough to actually pay attention to the news.

A bigger problem than people not being able to find themselves on a map is that many people simply do not pay attention to news at all, for a variety of reasons researchers don’t understand. Most of what people talk about on the national news is so far removed from the average person’s experience that they can’t relate to it. Even so-called educational public radio and television is not available in many rural areas, and most of the content seems so foreign or “liberal” to people that they wouldn’t tune in if they could get it and find it on the radio dial.

In most rural areas, in my experience, what comes through on the radio is mostly religious programming, and country music. This has to be a problem.

Local newspapers used to help people understand at least what was going on in their immediate areas, but what’s left of newspapers are mostly owned by large corporate chains. But papers would be little help anyway in warning people about an approaching tornado.

Local TV news stations try to do their best to cover things people care about, like fires, car wrecks, local crime and yes, the weather.

But there are still tens of thousands of people they cannot and may never reach.

This problem became apparent to me about 15 years ago. When I was in Birmingham watching CNN and saw all those people trapped in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, I knew what the problem was, and it was not that people in New Orleans couldn’t find themselves on a map. I have no doubt some of them probably couldn’t. But the real problem was that the poor people in New Orleans were simply not paying attention to the news on a routine basis and probably didn’t even know a hurricane was on the way.

While living, teaching and writing for newspapers in New Orleans, I once wrote a piece on a voodoo priestess who every year at the onset of hurricane season said a prayer to keep the hurricanes away.

New Orleans Voodoo Wards Off ‘The Big One’

During a particularly active hurricane season in the summer of 2002, while I was making a ton of money writing about hurricanes Lili and Isidore and others, I had an experience that made me realize this truth.

As the first bands of wind and rain made it into the city from Lili, a neighbor came home from work and asked me what was going on. I had pulled my Plymouth Voyager mini-van with the canoe on top into the yard off the street, just in case the “big one” hit New Orleans and the city ended up under water. I could reach the canoe from my second floor apartment balcony in case of a flood.

I remember saying to this clueless neighbor something like this.

“Do you not know what’s going on? There’s a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico headed right for the mouth of the Mississippi River and New Orleans. How could you not know this?”

It turned out this neighbor was so poor he could not even afford to pay the power bill so he could listen to a portable radio to find out the news. He didn’t even have batteries for the radio, never read a newspaper, didn’t own a television, and forget about internet access or a cell phone.

So clearly the problem is worse than people not being able to find themselves on a map.

How do we get people to pay attention to news in the age of smart phones and the internet?

Most people are not on Twitter, and if they are maybe on Facebook, which literally downplays the news, they are probably not following me or James Spann or paying attention to news. They are probably following their real friends and family members who are listening to their favorite music celebrities or commenting on religion and church.

To people who still think everything that happens to them, happens for a reason ordained by a god, why would they bother to pay attention to the news, or learn to read a weather map?

Hey, here’s an idea.

If you want to save lives from the growing number of large, violent storms we are going to face in coming years due to climate change from global warming caused by the burning fossil fuels for energy, maybe someone could get all the preachers in Alabama and elsewhere to tell their parishioners they can get free broadcast TV or a smart phone and internet access for about $150?

Maybe some smart congress womman or senator could get one of the federal agencies to write a grant to pay for this?

Then get all the preachers to tell people they need to pay attention to weather news — that is if they possess a desire to stay alive.

Good luck with that.

It’s a dangerous world out there. Pay attention if you want to stay safe.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in finding a place to live to escape climate change, you might want to check out this recent piece from the New York Times. Try Duluth, Minnesota or Buffalo, New York. Of course you are still going to freeze your ass off in the wintertime, which is why I have a media camper van — where I can move around to avoid the worst of it.

Want to Escape Global Warming? These Cities Promise Cool Relief