SnowJobs On My SnowBlog: Could We Shovel The Kneejerk Comments?

By Joel Alpert

“Little Darlin’…

I feel the ice is slowly melting”….

On Sunday after Snowjam 2014 we had gorgeous weather in Atlanta. The ice had melted, and some of our upset with the horrors of driving through Snowjam 2014 melted, too.

We might forget some of what we said should be done. And hopefully our civic leaders transform their ability to predict and react to traffic problems that can come with rough weather.

But let’s not forget how we spoke about this issue with each other.

When I wrote my piece “Don’t Shovel Blame On Georgia DOT… Don’t YOU Have A Role In Snowstorm 2014?”…including thoughts on where we fell short and what we should have done…

[ The piece I wrote: http://goo.gl/36O9E5 ]

…I wasn’t surprised to get some dialogue. What I didn’t expect was some of the “yellow snow” that some folks added.

Some folks were astute enough to point out that the comments people made were out of line. In “fact” many were ridiculous for various reasons. Some addressed completely different points. Some were wildly assumptive, to the point of absurdity. Some just chose to be nasty. 

“Think of what you're saying.

You can get it wrong and still you think that it's alright.

Think of what I’m saying,

We can work it out and get it straight, or say good night.”

— The Fab Four

I’ll tell you what some folks said in a moment. Before I do, let’s get this out of the way, so you read me loud and clear: They Shoulda Got It Right. They are noodleheads. Bozos. And cowards, who didn’t have the kohones to be leaders, and do the right thing -- despite our legendary skepticism about forecasts, and the accusatory fallout. While that’s a fair point, which I obviously agree with…it just wasn’t the point I was making.

Corporations and schools and government should never have opened. The snow and icing and mass-panic driving was a mess. And so many of my friends paid dearly. And there is responsibility on behalf of “leaders” – government and corporate.  But the responsibility for getting stuck is ultimately with ourselves.

So what did some of you say?

One Einstein tried to express his opinion of my piece with sarcastic mockery: 

“I'm from the North and we know how to do everything better up there. That's why I'm down here??? Go back home to paradise then, beotch....”

Nice.

One writer said:

I couldn't read this article without spitting out my coffee - partially from laughter, and some from such nonsense ! Our state and local government's failed us -again. Plain and simple.

Sorry you got coffee stains all over a perfectly good shirt.

Early in the “dialogue,” Barb Norris said:

Personal responsibility is a decaying value. Trusting the government is going to take care of you no matter what is taking the place of personal responsibility. No need to pay attention to the world around you and react so you can then blame it on govt when the 'system' fails you.

Mike Phillips responded:

I don't want to hear any crap about personal responsibility or any other Republican talking points. You get the limited government that you elect down here. If you don't want to pay taxes to support government and you keep slamming government, this is what you get. Nothing. Up north, people pay taxes so that their governments can actually get something accomplished, like plowing roads or providing job training or providing education. People demonize government down here and don't want it to do anything. This is the end result.

So Barb Norris responded with:

So you don't want to hear it? OK, then stop reading. How was (Joel’s original) post you are referencing 'slamming' the government, exactly? If you don't like the government and how it is run here, then work to change it or move. Those are your two options. People make personal responsibility choices in many ways, including who you put in as governor and as mayor. The mayor is a Democrat and the governor is a Republican...so now what? Get a clue it isn't a political party issue.

Just to shovel out from remarks like these, I wasn’t even thinking of what I wrote as a political column. While I should have realized that the words “left” and right” when referenced the directions these attacks were coming from might be interpreted politically, it was either Freud or Groucho Marx who said “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” I actually just meant left or right, as in “up and down” or from every direction.

There was not one political reference in the piece I wrote. I identified with neither “party” on this, and expressing those agendas never crossed my mind. An astute observer might call me Libertarian, because I observed that like lemmings we relied too much on the government “guidance,” and not enough on readily available weather reports (which might be a Socialist plot from Kenya, or cyber-terrorism from Sochi) and we threw ourselves onto the highways. But I’m not expressing a Libertarian point of view either.  If you came to the party with predispositions as these, do realize those colored glasses are affecting your vision.

While there was much politicization of the comments on my posting, lots of your next-door neighbors join me in this wildass “personal responsibility” thing, and the assignment of blame.

Nancy B

This "blame game" is really getting old and all the rude comments say a lot about the writers of the comments…. How many of us "planned" appropriately for this?

Ivory Dorsey

“Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier.” ― Randy Pausch, ~ ”The Last Lecture”

Yes, my point was: Use your own head. Especially if you think “They” don’t usually get it right!  (Remember that one colloquial definition of “insanity” is doing the same things over and over again, and expecting different results. )

Preventing problems and dealing with our rare snow/ice issues is not a political policy issue. As far as I’m concerned, it’s about clarity of leadership and management. And doing so in the face of a no-win scenario: we complain when it does snow and we don’t deal with it well (despite all warnings)…and we complain about false alarms if it doesn’t ice-over enough to be a big problem. Of course the only solution is more equipment, and stronger leadership…both needed, in combination.

Many of your next-door neighbors drank the same KoolAid that I did, with this “personal responsibility” as the bottom-line guideline.  

Grace Perry

Agree 100%. Everyone knew this was coming and the greedy business owners refused to take their employees safety and well-being into consideration and send them home before the snow hit.

Nancy B:

How many of us "planned" appropriately for this?

Boyd Leake:

We paid attention to the weather reports the day before. We sent our children to school on Tuesday making sure they had hats, scarves, gloves, heavy coats and hiking boots. My wife did the same thing. We both listened to the radio reports at work and as they said the weather was getting worse, around 1:00, she headed home from Decatur and I head to get the children from school. took us both about an hour to meet at home. The point of all this is that we listened to the weather reports, planned for the worse and took action before things got too bad.

Ron Cohen:

"Who is that Joel Alpert guy and why is he telling me I am supposed to be responsible for myself... sheesh…."

Connie Lombardo:

I don't drive in Atlanta when it's snowing. Never have and the 2011 debacle confirmed that it's not a wise choice. However, I think the school systems had much to do with the gridlock. I read about one school official who said that if they had closed the schools and it hadn't snowed they'd get a bunch of grief about it. So, damned if you do damned if you don't???? Gee, how obviously flawed is that logic!!!!

Terry Smith:

How many of you want to pay higher taxes to help pay for all of that extra equipment, man hours etc so the roads, streets, interstates can be treated each and every time the media hypes another winter storm? how many will not grouse about having school cancelled and having to scramble to find baby sitters? as for the greedy business owners, again, if business had erred on the side of caution and closed people would be grousing because of lost pay or inconvenience...I'm not defending Deal or Reed, i think they're both clowns. Things happen, deal with it.

Kanitbeu:

I agree. I have a boss who told me Monday that we would close the office at 11:00 on Tuesday and I am so thankful he had the foresight to make that call.  I know we don't get this often enough to warrant purchasing equipment so the companies should just tell employees to stay home when snow is predicted under these conditions. And anyone could do the math and realize that at 34 degrees snow is going to melt and temperatures were predicted to drop rapidly, which was on weather channel as of Monday, which means the water from the melting snow would freeze and that means roads would be freezing over. All that adds up to hazardous road conditions. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

Tracy White:

I bought myself some snow cable chains after the incompetency of 2011. Fifty bucks. How many other people put some on their cars? Anyone? Crickets out there?

GoAndie:

Yeah, all of Atlantans knew about the storm coming via TV weather report or radio, so why would working adults rely on their jobs and city government to tell them when to stay home due to a storm is coming? Why didn't each adult THINK FOR HIMSELF? …everyone else living in ATL from 2011 to now, ought to know to NOT BANK on them to get it right!!!

That was my point. Thanks, folks, and the others who agreed with me. (Yay, now I’m “right”!)

Heaven help us if “responsibility” is the exclusive political domain of Republicans. If that’s the case, to bastardize the lyrics from “The Music Man” musical:  “Wyes, we Got Trouble, right here in River City…with a capital T that rhymes with P, that rhymes with Reed (and Deal)."

One person was outraged...that we weren’t “outraged about the breakdown of cellular communications in our region.” Hey, cellphone towers and salt spreaders have something on common – we have a limit on how many we have, they’re based on demand – and demand clearly exceeded supply on everything this past week. Including our patience, and famed civic civility. We lost a little bit all around here.

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, some Damn Yankee who probably goes ice fishing, used his national forum to rip us a new icehole: 

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-january-30-2014/south-parked

It’s worth watching, but only if you think you can maintain some perspective on this (ahem) polarizing issue. And his “report” noted that The Weather Channel and CNN which forecast the icing, are both located right here in Atlanta…as is “The Department Of Seeing S#*t Coming.”

And SNL featured our fair city in Seth Meyer’s final News Update. Meyers kicked off the "Update" with a report about a rare winter storm that paralyzed Atlanta, stranding some people in cars for two days, despite only two inches of accumulation. He then introduced “a survivor of the storm,” a hyperbolic wax-mustachioed, mint-julep-sipping-type Southern gentleman who described the snow as "devil's dandruff," "Connecticut confetti," "New England clam powder" and "Obama's white friend." Okay, I KNEW the 2” snowfall was a political plot…it’s Obama’s way of making the masses overly-dependent on government snowplows.

We got some crisis management that needs to be done. Me, too… I apologize for the typos in my blog, before I corrected them. You’re right. (I will not write in TextEdit, I will use Word with spellcheck.) And I attempted to correct some if the typos and grammatical errors of your comments in editing this follow-up. But I don’t apologize for words like “lemme” and “shoulda” or even starting a sentence with “But.”

I expect my small cadre of detractors will get a laugh to know that I was a newspaper writer and editor for 5 years on big city publications. (If I said where, you’d have something to say about that, too.) I view my writing style (not my typos)  as the penultimate expression of my freedom as an American (cue the patriotic marching band music). You can call it Grammatical Armageddon. Or Idiosyncratic Idiocy. It’s just a writing style. It ain’t even political, yo.

Guys…y’all….let’s not be victims. Let’s not be lemmings. Let’s not be the objects of ridicule – not so much because we can’t poke fun at ourselves and look a little silly, but more like because when we forget our better sense and act stoopid, it costs us (like one friend who had an 18-hour horror story….and maybe the city hosting the SuperBowl). 

Let’s not miss the connection between “We’re going to have some snow” and “It’s going to freeze.” That adds up to ice. We shouldn’t need The Government to tell us that icy roads mean treacherous travel.

And while we need to get our act together on this in a big way, and God help us all I hope the noodleheads have figured this out already, let’s not waste too much time blaming the government – even if they did stoopid things. Because we know they do stoopid things. All of us humans do stoopid things. We have to think for ourselves. It’s our own responsibility to do so. That’s my point.

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Joel Alpert consults businesses on how to develop effective strategy, powerful branding, and award-winning creative communications. He shows individuals how to pack more punch in their LinkedIn profiles and networking, with workshops and personal branding /coaching/resumes/ online presence. The MarketPower Branding Workshop is coming soon, too. (On FaceBook: Atlanta LinkedIn, or connect with me on LinkedIn).