Come Hell or High Water

Recently in the news:

UK - Britain's winter is the coldest since 1683 and close to being the chilliest in nearly 1,000 years

MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin harshly reprimanded officials Wednesday over a winter weather shutdown at Moscow airports that left thousands stranded for days, and he banned high-ranking officials from taking vacations until further notice. Icy rains covered runways and planes with a thick layer of ice over the weekend and caused a blackout at the capital's largest airport, Domodedovo, which halted all flights for a day. Domodedovo resumed operations Monday, but a backlog of delayed flights left thousands stuck.

New York, ... all three airports were closed for a time, ... thousands of flights canceled by the storm—and especially the difficulty the airlines experienced trying to rebook passengers—was at least partially a consequence of an overburdened air travel system, one that lacked the flexibility to deal with an extreme event.

NEW YORK — As many as 9,000 passengers were stuck on the tarmac from three to 12 hours at John F. Kennedy International Airport as a result of this week's blizzard, and blame shifting has already begun.... "It was so frustrating, just sitting there for hours, waiting for more bad news," Cathay passenger Gigi Godfrey, 24, told the Associated Press.

New York mayor Mayor Bloomberg apologized for snow screw-ups during blizzard of 2010.

I want the significance of this statement to sink in – the Mayor is apologizing for not having enough GOVERNMENT employees on hand to deal with city services.

The “entitlement attitude” in western society, and in America in particular, is extremely annoying to me. We seem to have this expectation that we should be immune to inconvenience, delays and acts of nature. By god, we have a right to build our condo on the beach and the government better damn well replace it after the storm surge wipes it into the surf… for the third time. How dare the airline cancel my flight due to unsafe flying conditions!

I am particularly bothered by the public's disconnect between their disdain for all things government yet the equally contradictory expectation that government insulate them from all the uncertainties of human existence. People often bring up the anecdote of their Department of Motor Vehicles – they chaff at the necessity to stand in a line every eight years; yet they are equally as certain that the damn DMV, and government in general, is over staffed.

I level my own accusatory finger toward the news media as purveyors of the entitlement expectation. Often in the aftermath of disaster, the first thing out of news is speculation about how the response could have been anticipated and handled better... followed by the question of who should be fired. In other words, regardless of the cause, SOMEONE is to blame.

Were I Mayor Bloomburg, rather than apologizing, I might ask the press corps how they think the snow plow drivers get to work? Or explain how difficult it is to plow a street choked by the abandoned cars of those idiots who believed they had a right to drive regardless of extreme conditions. Bloomburg should, in my opinion, be saying: “You people wanted less government; you have the government you deserve.”

It reminds me of a poem I heard years ago, titled “The Job”:

I'm not allowed to run the train
The whistle I can't blow
I'm not the one who designates
How far the train will go
I'm not allowed to blow the steam
Or even ring the bell
But let the damn thing jump the track
And see who catches hell.