By Joel Mathis, The Week

Extreme weather doesn’t really bother me. I’ve lived in Kansas most of my life, have witnessed tornadoes and flooding, love nothing more than a good gullywasher rain storm. You respect the danger of such events, but you also get used to them. It’s part of the landscape here, as familiar as grain silos.

Wednesday felt different.

Fierce windstorms battered my state throughout the day, starting large-scale wildfires, blowing off roofs, knocking out power to tens of thousands of people, and generating images out of a disaster movie. The late part of the day brought tornado warnings and severe thunderstorms. We hunkered down. And for most of the day I felt uneasy — not just because of the power and size of the storms, but because of the timing: We were getting May weather in December.

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