I don’t like to romanticize places but I often feel, living in a rural part of the country, that I live closer to the real values that have shaped this amazing country, a great experiment in freedom and decency and individuality. I thought about this in the morning when New York City closed it’s subway system at 11 p.m, an “abundance of caution” said the mayor of the New York.

I wonder if he knew that the city’s poohbahs decided to build the subways in 1888 after a monster blizzard – far bigger than the one that hit New York today – shut the city down.

The big blizzard was real, it is wreaking havoc in Boston and parts of New England, but it mostly skipped New York City. It is snowing here in Bedlam, the urgent warnings (my utility messaged me that people my age should stay indoors and make sure neighbors checked in on them. No chores for me, I told Maria, but she did not get the memo)

The city fathers (there were no city  mothers then) decided that the great city would never again be shut down by a blizzard, so the country’s biggest underground transit system was built. I wonder what the city leaders would make of our time, when the subways are closed long before a storm even hits,  and the city is shut down, all out of an “abundance of caution,” the new national motto it seems. I see mayors and governors in their new sporty emergency caps and windbreakers using the phrase every time there is a storm, violent incident or other kind of emergency.

In Ohio, they closed a bunch of schools because an Ebola-stricken nurse flew into one of the state’s airports (and tossed a nurse into a tent in Newark against her will because she had treated Ebola patients in West Africa. Remember that panic?) . An abundance of caution, they say. In Atlanta last week, several passenger flights were diverted because a wingnut called in an anonymous bomb threat. The planes were ordered to the ground and delayed for hours. It seems anyone with a cell phone or any weather channel with a computer model can shut down a flight, or close a school, stop a movie, shut down our greatest city.

What would New York’s mayor of 1888 make of our mayor today, who got on his green windbreaker and assured the city residents that they were about to face something more menacing and dangerous than the city had ever faced before? He didn’t say it was a possibility, he didn’t urge anyone to stay calm and keep perspective. He said it was an absolutely sure thing, be prepared.  It is good to know, to be forewarned, these new and awful storms are very real. B ut it strikes me that fear alone is not a good measure of how to govern, or how to prepare. Or  how to save the world.

You can underestimate, for sure. You can overestimate. You can fail to anticipate. You can overreact. We can be a strong and confident people, we can be a timid and manipulable people. Maybe those windbreakers that say “emergency” really impress us.

It does not reflect the American spirit to me, it does not inspire or comfort me, it seems a surrender to the worst of us, not the best.

Our national response to any kind of threat and danger seems to be to shut everything done, we have a new national motto: Cautio Abundantium: Abundance Of Caution. It can perhaps now go on all the dollar bills, it can replace E Pluribus Unum.

We live in an abundance of caution, a world of fear, warnings, alarms and butt-covering. I see it in the animal world as well, if you put up a photo of a dog in a car, you will be flooded with warnings about heat stroke and animals. If you say, you are sick, there will be many messages urging you to rush to the hospital.

Leaders are no longer expected to lead, they are expected to succumb to every imaginable fear, sensitivity, hysteria or prejudice. And I wonder what it costs for them to get all that fancy emergency fashion gear? Are taxes paying for that? People are no longer expected to think for themselves, to judge their own risks, to make their own choices. Out of an Abundance of Caution, we are all asked to stay inside and wet ourselves while the corporate marketers and grocery stories rake in a lot of money off of our fear and timidity.

I think I will reject Abundance Of Caution as my motto and ethos and lifestyle. I am a pretty cautious person, I was running around all night filling the bathtub with water, checking on the animals. If I lived in an Abundance Of Caution, I would never have moved upstate, bought a farm, written about animals, gotten divorced, met or married Maria, taken in Simon, moved to our new home.  Early this morning, I went out into the pasture to check on things, and I saw a little black mouse running in circles in the freezing cold and wind, he looked absolutely panicked, trying to dig a hole for shelter in the ice.

I felt for him, I watched – so did Red – as he spun in circles and finally exhausted himself, and lay down to die. I came over, picked him up by his tail and brought him into the barn and deposited him on top of a warm and dry bale of hay. He burrowed right in and vanished. I know you would have figured it out, I said. Abundance Of Caution.