Don’t shoot the messenger
Julia Fabian | Fulcrum Staff
ONCE AGAIN, THE weather outside is frightful. Ottawans from all corners of the city are wondering if it is too much to ask to please have March weather in March, and keep December weather in December. With the arrival of the third (fourth?) winter storm in a couple of months, it’s no wonder that tempers are rising as quickly as the snowbanks.
Yes, it’s frustrating; but it’s frustrating for all of us. So I send out the following message to those grumpy people who seem to feel entitled to complain endlessly about this bout of nasty weather: Please stop. We are all travelling on the bus with you; we all have chunks of snow dripping into our socks; if you look closely, you will see that our eyelashes are just as frozen as yours. Snow, like death, unites all people.
Above all, we are all late for something. When a bus is 40 minutes delayed, as mine was on that blizzardy Tuesday morning, there is no point in getting on and yelling at the poor bus driver, who very likely had nothing at all to do with the bus’s tardiness, and who will have the hardest job on that bus for the next half hour, the half hour that you sit and stew in your misery while he navigates ice, detours, and the constant fear of getting stuck.
They say that life’s most puzzling problems are those that have no solution. Likewise, life’s most frustrating situations are those that can’t be blamed on anyone, and I think that might be at the core of this city-wide resentment and gloom. We can’t send an email to Mother Nature or whack our meteorologists over the head with a pair of woolen mittens until they tell us something we really want to hear. We know it would do no good and that is the most depressing part.
This weather will pass. Remember in the summer when you actually feel beads of sweat dripping down your body as you try to fall asleep? When you beg for a cool breeze to come in the window to put you out of your stuffy, stagnant, and stifled misery? That time will come back, as sure as the sun will rise to turn this snow into nasty brown slush. So please, in the meantime, keep things in perspective, and remember: we are all in this icebox together.
