One of the big advantages/disadvantages of living in Texas is that it doesn't get terribly cold here except for a handful of days when we get a hard freeze like we have the past couple of days. Lately, it's gotten down to anywhere between 19 and 29 degrees outside. As a result, work, classes and any myriad of events have been closing "due to inclement weather." Because it's cold. Not a blizzard....just cold. Above zero cold.
Now, don't get me wrong. As a professional pedestrian, I can personally tell you it is NOT FUN out there. But then again, I'm saying that from a bus stop in a city of mainly drivers. People with cars that have heaters, that get them from point A to B expeditiously. All over facebook, people are pissing in their pants over the imminent snow....flurries. They're whining and moaning about how they should get to go home from work or how they shouldn't have to go to school blah blah blah. The irony here is that the same people that think it's too damn cold to go to work are the same people that think it's just warm enough to meander about in the bookstore I work at, looking for a copy of Confessions of a Video Vixen. It made me think back to about a month ago when Pennsylvania governor Ed Wendell, tweaked about a Vikings game being snowed out, said we are a nation of wussies for not toughing it out. Did he have it right after all? I mean, it wouldn't be the first time the Eagles or the Vikings played in nasty weather. They're warriors, after all. Do we all have cowardice as a common denominator? I submit....no. Think about it. Wussies don't go overseas picking as many fights as America does. Wussies don't go around telling the rest of the world that they're the greatest country in the world despite not having a real plan for health insurance, owing money to half of the universe and being in Kim Jong Il's crosshairs. Ed had it all wrong. We are not a nation of wussies (he wanted to say "pussies", by the way). We are a nation of pimps and prostitutes. Capitalism (in this case, the banks) is the pimp, the government/workforce is the "bottom b*tch" that keeps everyone in line and we are the somnambulant whore, to paraphrase Tyler Durden, "working jobs we hate to buy sh** we don't need." That game was cancelled for one reason: money. The NFL would rather call the whole damn thing off than run the risk that nobody would show. Same thing with retail stores, using the mere thought of snow as an excuse to save a little money that may go down the drain keeping an customer void building's worth of lights on. Besides, as much as we like to think we're raging against the machine, we do exactly what we're told whether we realize it or not. Even when we raise hell about tax cuts and unemployment, thinking ourselves immune to fear mongering from village idiots like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, all they have to do is play Chicken Little on the Weather Channel and we spend all week doing exactly what they want: consuming. Stocking up on food and supplies, hunkering down like it's the storm of the f**king century in a city that sees maybe three centimeters of snow for one day every two years on average. Now, if that's not a pimp fake, I don't know what is. Then again, I could be wrong.
You are so good at this. It's a gift I tell ya :-) But yet being a Chicago native, I've trucked through navel high snow (I'm only 5 ft) to do whatever I needed or wanted to. We just received 20 maybe more inches of snow and schools were the only things that closed down. Oh yea, the mail didn't run either. And the Governor is not the only one that has publicly expressed his thoughts of america displaying bitchassness. A lot of people consider us a bully, and those same people say bullying is a sign of weakness, but that's another story. Any who, even though I was born and raised in Chicago I will always say during those October-April months, "It's colder than a bitch!"
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