By now we’ve all become aware of Hurricane Beryl, which left a trail of death and destruction in its wake during the past week stretching from the Southern Caribbean to Texas as it set records for the strongest-ever hurricane — a Category 5 — this early in the season.

Beryl grew — and maintained — its ferocity thanks to the warmest-ever sea surface temperatures for June in the Atlantic. Warm ocean waters are the jet fuel for hurricanes and in the case of Beryl, provided the key ingredient for Beryl’s rapid intensification and re-intensification as it traveled over thousands of miles of ocean.

Hurricane forecasters in April issued a forecast for an extremely active hurricane season and Beryl’s record-setting run appears to be only a prelude to what may be in store for those of us who live along the coast in the coming months.

As we have noted in the past, there is no escape anywhere in the world from the effects of climate change. We can only hope that our little corner of the globe will luck out for another year and we’ll escape the wrath of the worst that Mother Nature can throw at us.

Ready to turn on, tune in, drop out

As newspaper people, by necessity we’re political junkies, whether at the local, state, or federal levels.

When it comes to national news, we try to read as much as we can from reputable news sources to learn as much as we can about the issues and the candidates.

So it’s always been a bit of a surprise when we see polls indicating that public interest in the upcoming election is at an all-time low.

We realize that this is a result of many factors, chief among them that we have two candidates for president who are old enough to be the great-grandfathers of the youngest voters and that neither candidate provides inspiration to any of us. In addition, with their surrogates and spokespersons feeding us the same banal “spin” night after night, trying to convince us not to believe what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears, we all just want to tune out the mind-numbing noise.

We want the truth, but all we get is something far short from both sides.

We were listening to the Classic Rock station on our Sirius Radio the other day and the haunting sound of “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield came on. The song was written in the mid-’60s, but it’s as timely today as it was then with lyrics perfectly capturing today’s political climate:

There’s battle lines being drawn

Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong

Singing songs and they carrying signs

Mostly say, “Hooray for our side” 

In the wake of the fiasco of the first presidential debate, even we are ready to throw in the towel — we give up.

Or, to put it another way, in the famous words of advice espoused by Timothy Leary (the Harvard professor-turned-guru of psychedelic drugs) at the same time that For What It’s Worth was playing on the airwaves, it just might be time to, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”