Old Man Winter

It's November, and inevitably, that means snow in NE Ohio, and today we got our first real blast of winter with a lake effect snowstorm that overnight dumped several inches of snow on the ground. Unfortunately, even though we live in a temperate climate, people often forget how to drive in this kind of weather. Even yesterday's slight dusting of snowfall caused numerous crashes and fender benders and roads were jammed up with traffic going nowhere. Today wasn't much better, and what was worse was that there is no salt available to clear the roads, so without snowplows and road saltings, the road conditions were perfectly treacherous today and it took me over an hour just to drive a mere 15 miles to work. I guess this is a side effect of the recession in that they can't even send the trucks out to plow the roads, let alone salt them, meaning that if this continues well into the winter months, driving conditions in this, a part of the state whose weather is very much controlled by Lake Erie, is going to be rough going the deeper we get into winter. Cities and counties are feeling the pinch of the recession and since there isn't any salt left over from last winter, they don't have any to spare for the upcoming snowstorms and tight budgets are preventing them from being able to purchase new supplies of it. Either this means I'll start taking the bus to work and letting someone else do the driving or I'm going to have to depart a full hour and a half before my report time at work to give myself adequate time to crawl down icy snow covered roads between Kent and Akron. Either way, winter's going to be tough if the local cities and counties can't get adequate salt supplies to get us through yet another Lake Erie winter.

FEAR OF ANGRY WHITE MEN

One of my biggest fears as Obama takes office as our 44th President is that there are cabals of angry white men who won't accept a President who doesn't look like them. In other words, white. I know that there are a lot of folks out there who feel as if their country is slipping away from them and that there are more people who are not white and/or Christian, and these same folks feel threatened by it all. And now we have our first black President and I am desperately afraid for his safety because of people who still listen to what I call "dittohead radio", people like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and other right wingnut types and who believe everything they say. I see plenty of battered old pickup trucks with gun racks and Confederate flags on them and I begin to wonder just what kind of rednecks are out there who under no circumstances whatsoever will accept a black President, no matter what, and it makes me afraid of those kinds of people. Racism hasn't gone away just because we elected Obama. It's still very much there, simmering under the surface. I see it at work, I hear it from people on the streets, I know it exists. So I suppose I have every reason to fear that some disgruntled right wingnut will try to do some kind of harm to our new President and it makes me worry and fear that even with Secret Service protection, that someone's going to find a way to try something as a way to express their hatred of people of color. I hope and pray that I am wrong, but all you have to do is to go to Obama's Facebook page and you can see some of the hateful comments posted there. For example, some dittohead posted about a dozen messages with just one word in them, that being the "N" word. There were other posts filled with nasty pejoratives that just go to show that there are plenty of angry white folks that simply won't stand for a black man in the highest office in the land. It makes me afraid. I know I shouldn't be, but I am, because there are just enough wingnuts out there who believe all the hateful comments they hear on hate radio programs and who may just try to express their anger by trying to do something stupid to do harm to our next President. I hope I'm wrong about this, but I'm afraid that I'm not.