Snowy Day, Dream Away

First off I want to wish all of you a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year, filled with all the Lord's blessings.  It wasn't my intention to take over a week off from the blog, but since the passing this week of Fr. Hector Poulin, SDB most of my time was taken up with helping to coordinate the funeral arrangements.  This was Fr. Hector's last assignment before going to St. Philip's Residence in Tampa, Florida.  He had been suffering from Alzheimer's, and Fr. Pat Diver, my predecessor here, had done God's work caring for him until he needed more specialized care.  So we had the funeral here at St. Anthony's yesterday, New Year's Eve, with the burial up at our cemetery in Goshen, New York.  But I did start on a reflection on the weather before things got too crazy, and  here it is:

The best laid schemes of priests and pastors oft get buried under 31.8 inches of snow.  Last Sunday, the day after Christmas, I waited out the storm here in Elizabeth, hoping to get out Monday.  The last time I tried to beat a winter storm to New England I ended up right in the middle of it, crawling a long at 15 miles an hour, barely keeping on the road.  So I hunkered down for the night.  The next morning the sun was out, even if the birds weren't chirping, so I figured I could make my  get away.  I shoveled a path from the garage to the street and I tested out our new four wheel dive Honda.  Not that I'm trying to sell you cars folks, but it passed with flying colors.  It was after 1PM before I got going and figured the main roads would be cleared.  Needless to say the roads, even Elizabeth Avenue, were a mess.  Added to that, every entrance to the Jersey Turnpike was clogged with semis, vans and other assorted and sundry vehicles stuck in the snow.  No matter which approach I tried, the results were the same; there was no way to get out of Elizabeth.

The story was the same all over the Metro Area;  un-plowed streets, stuck cars and mass transit shut downs.  It would be easy to jump ugly on the poor sanitation department.  If it is true that the New York City sanitation worker's union was using the blizzard to stage a labor slowdown then you'd have a gripe, to put it mildly.  But we as a people have to come to grips with the fact that the government is not bigger than the weather.  There are going to be times when even the best, most efficient municipality is going to get overwhelmed by mother nature.  This was the type of storm that happens maybe once in a generation around here.  I'm not sure if it's more correct to say that we've been conditioned, brain washed or spoiled into believing that the government is some all powerful force that has the ability to save us in every situation, and make everything right in an emergency with time to spare.  But it just doesn't happen that way.  These are human institutions that can do great good, but are also limited and fallible.  As much as we don't want to believe it, the street isn't always going to get plowed quickly, the garbage picked up promptly and, more disturbingly, the ambulance might not always get there on time.

I'm not saying we shouldn't demand that the government do its job, but to understand that it doesn't replace our responsibility to prepare ourselves and use common sense in times of crisis.  Sometimes we should just stay home (memo to self on that one) and out of the streets, and enjoy the downtime while it lasts.  Also, people out of the streets means fewer cars stalled and abandoned that makes the city's job of plowing that much tougher.

Well, that's all I have to say about that.  But there is a wider point to be made about our reliance on government and whether we've become a nation of wussies (yeah, I'm going there).  More next time.