Can I just get some things off my chest? I'm putting it behind a read more tag so you can skip it easily. The weather here has been hard, but I know it's been hard in so many place in the US and Canada. (I'm sure it's hard in many places all over the world.) I know the west is struggling with terrible droughts. New England has been particularly hard hit this year and I'm starting to see a lot of comments and news reports I find upsetting. Just skip this unless you're really interested for some reason, OK? Ok.
Newscasters who are like, "Pffft. Lake Tahoe gets that much snow every year." That's an idiotic thing to say. I looked on wikipedia and on average they would get this much snow in 3-4 months. They do not get 90 inches or 7 feet or 228 cms in 3-4 weeks. I'm guessing there are like 30,000 people in the greater Lake Tahoe area. The metro Boston area is several million people. There are at least 500k trips on public transit here a day normally. Can you see the difference?
It also snows more in a lot of places like Mt. Ranier or The Alps or Nagano The Arctic (turns out they only get 20 inches in The Arctic. Thank you, Genderific!) But they don't have as many people or buildings or roads or businesses that are struggling. They don't have as much stuff to damage. They also don't have that stuff in Lake Tahoe. We rely heavily on public transportation here and when it goes down we are all stuck. People cannot get to work or get home. They cannot get to the store or to pharmacies to get medication. You may live somewhere--where you get into your car and drive to a place and that's how you get everywhere. We don't do that here as much. We walk and bike and take the subway and buses and trains.
We're not being punished because the Patriots won a football game or did something weird with footballs. The west coast is not being punished with terrible droughts because of anything they did. I think this is a combination of nobody controls the weather, sometimes it is severe, and climate change. We're doing a poor job of managing our environments. And I see people pointing the finger at the US a lot for this. We have screwed up, but I think we're doing better these days. We have a lot more we could and should be doing. Frankly what worries me now more is China. They are experiencing an industrial boom and they don't have good regulations about making products in terms of what goes into them or what they do with waste materials. (How many pet toys or foods or other items have you seen warnings about for lead or plastics or toxins that were made in China?) This is a problem everywhere--but the scale on which this happens in the largest, most populous countries has more of an impact. The same way 7 feet of snow in a short time affects a large metro area a lot more than it does a ski resort town with less than a tenth of the population.
People in the southern US and midwest are suffering quite a lot too. The south is not prepared to deal with cold and snow on these levels. They don't have the plows or road salt. Their homes are sometimes not as winter proofed. Children don't have the clothing to endure sub zero wind chills. It's dangerous and I do not fault one person in DC or SC or GA or TN for saying it's bad and dangerous and they are freezing and miserable. The same way I would NOT fault a person who cannot swim for struggling when they are tossed into water they can't stand up in and ocean currents they aren't used to. I can swim and have swum in the ocean my whole life, but why would I mock someone who couldn't and say, "Look. I can do this. You're just whining." Yes, we have more snow up here. Yes, it's colder. It's more snow than we can cope with. The financial impact of this is quickly becoming ugly.
But it's a hard winter in many places and it's beyond our abilities to cope with this.Before you tell other people to quit their whining or that someone else has it worse--think about their situation and whether or not this is hard for them based on their resources, population, and infrastructure. Parts of rural Maine have been really messed up by these storms and are getting no help or attention. They are buried. Cities like Portland and Bangor are struggling too and it's going to be a while before we can get everything back in good working order.
I'm nervous about the next week. It's going to snow, then possibly rain or sleet, melt some of the snow we have a little bit and then the temperatures are going to drop 30-40 degrees and freeze it all into cement-like ice. When your car is embedded in inches of ice you cannot get it out. Buses and trains cannot run. People can't go much of anywhere safely. The potential for this next mess to cripple this city even more severely and many other places is scary. And when this does all finally melt? I hope it will do it slowly.
Thank you for your time if you made it this far. Suffering shouldn't be a contest. We're all suffering. We all have hardships. Life is hard. We all make it harder when we dismiss other people's suffering. It doesn't cost you a thing to have compassion for other people, despite what you are enduring. And the benefit can be enormous to you and the world.
Compassion takes practice. It's scary because it means you have to honestly look at other people's suffering and pain and acknowledge it and that can be paralyzing. It can also be oddly freeing. Depending on what you do with it. And it's OK to step away from news or tell someone that you don't have the energy to cope with their pain right now.
People often just want to be heard. They don't want you to fix their problems and I think we forget that.
