While El Niño started out innocently as a simple weather pattern change that occurs naturally every nine years (so how come I never heard about it before?), human beings, in our fascination with melodrama, have built it up to be the Blob of the nineties. Suddenly El Niño is being blamed for torrential rain, no rain, political events, stock market fluctuations, mood swings, grandma’s cake not rising, and Uncle Sidney’s hemorrhoids.

Whatever happened to the good old days when you could just blame your problems on your parents? At least then your shrink could give you a pillow to pound, and you could go home feeling relieved. But this El Niño thing just seems to be growing like the fungus that wouldn’t die. Even Candida can’t hold a candle to El Niño.

Being a person who does not like to present a problem without offering a solution, I have devised some practical responses to El Niño. These are not light solutions; mind you, they come on the heels of hundreds of pre-teen Saturday afternoons at the movies watching scientists figure out how to combat the likes of Godzilla and Rodan. So here are my expert suggestions:

1. Make a sacrificial offering. In all the medieval stories in which a town is besieged by a fire-breathing dragon, the whimpering villagers would offer the dragon a virgin sacrifice. As you have probably already realized, this presents another problem. Since we have been led to believe there are no more sacrificial virgins left, I think we should offer El Niño the city of Cleveland. Now, before all of you Clevelanders get bent out of shape, think of it this way: you will not have to go through the heartbreak of another Indians World Series loss.

2. Put El Niño on the phone with Dr. Laura.

3. Give El Niño a sitcom co-starring Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.

4. Enroll El Niño in a multi-level marketing program. Why would El Niño want to destroy California when he could sell millions of citizens bluegreen algae?

5. Send a team of Jehovah’s Witnesses to El Niño’s house just as he is about to sit down to dinner.

6. Elect El Niño president and send him an intern.

7. Get El Niño into therapy with Robin Williams.

8. Offer El Niño a Starbucks franchise.

9. Produce "Tickle Me El Niño" dolls and send El Niño on a promotional tour for Christmas.

As if El Niño were not enough, humans once again prove to be more outrageous than the weather. People around the country got El Niño’s telephone number, and they are calling him with their complaints. Well, sort of. A Californian named Al Nino has received a wave of angry calls from people who have had it with the weather. Al has become a popular guest on television and radio talk shows, trying to get the point across to the American public that he is not the El Niño, and although some of his relatives have been known to disturb the neighborhood with various domestic quarrels, he is truly not responsible for their crop failures.

Perhaps we need to take a look at our propensity to blame our problems on external circumstances. We are the cause of our world, not the effect. The word "scapegoat" comes from the Bible, issuing from the time that Moses’ brother Aaron was leading the Hebrew people in the wilderness. Aaron would designate a goat onto which the people could pour their sins. Then the goat would be sent off into the desert, thus purging the Israelites of their iniquities. In a sense this ritual worked, as it made the people feel better. But in a sense it backfired, because the method taught the people that you could become free by dumping your guilt on another person or entity. Aaron didn’t invent this process; he just played on a mechanism of the human psyche that has always existed, and continues to exist today—voila El Niño.

You may remember the Flip Wilson show in which Flip popularized the phrase, "The devil made me do it!" While you and I may not believe in the devil as such, we may find many different devils on which to pin our problems. None of them are the cause of our pain. Only fear, judgment, resistance, and a sense of separateness cause our pain; all else is projection, denial, and illusion.

El Niño is not a punishment, and it does not call for fear. The weather is not the source of our sense of smallness; erroneous thinking is. Anthropologists describe three basic models for the way human beings have historically related to nature: 1. Humans under nature; 2. Humans over nature; and 3. Humans in nature. Number 3 is the only way that works, for it is the way it is. We are not separate from our environment, but one with. Instead of making a bloodthirsty menace out of El Niño, let us respect it and see how we can harmonize with it.

Everything we see outside of us is a reflection of what is going on within us. Storms and earthquakes represent our internal upheavals, from which we can learn and grow. El Niño is not our enemy. Misunderstanding and our sense of powerlessness are the things we need to deal with. Let’s get over El Niño and face ourselves, where our true power lies.

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