Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don't

Al Roker, astute management expert that he is, along with Mika Brzezinski, whose primary claim to fame is that she is her rather brilliant father’s daughter, have taken aim at Governor Deal and Mayor Reed in pointing out the utter failure of local governments to respond appropriately to the most recent snow event here in the deep south. If, as representative of the media, those two are no more competent commentators on far more important issues surrounding us than this one, then all I can say is “God help us.”

I have no interest in defending either the governor or the mayor. They are big boys and made the volitional choice to be in the hot seats of their respective governments. I’m actually not all that big a fan of government, too many of us who are followers of Jesus are more than willing to let government do the work God has called us to do – on issues of far greater significance than the snow storm. If I understand Paul correctly, as he wrote to believers in Rome, believers do best when they stay under the radar of government, not when they go to bed with the governing authorities. (Romans 13:1-7, oddly enough a text I have, for some time, planned to preach about at Grace: A Community of Faith, this Sunday morning.)

I’m not dismissive of the horrible experiences thousands of people had trying to get home Tuesday or of the school kids who were stuck on school busses or forced to spend the night in school buildings, separated from parents. I spent more than a few hours greatly concerned about my two daughters and my son-in-law who were trying to get home in less than good situations. My brother-in-law ended up spending the night away from home because he simply couldn’t get there. Eventually it seems that those trying situations were resolved in good ways – but I can’t imagine the turmoil of worrying about loved ones stuck on gridlocked highways on a night when the temperature was in the teens.

But, a moment of honesty might make us a little reluctant to be so quick to cast blame on others, without at least a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror!

Independent to a fault. Our southern DNA seems to make us dislike government in general, and the more regional it gets, the less we trust it. Two of the major counties impacted by this snow storm have experienced a rash of “new cities” being created, because they are convinced the larger, county governments don’t have their best interests at heart. Georgia has 159 counties, the largest number of counties in the United States except for Texas. More than a few preachers in Atlanta preach to larger audiences than the population of some of these counties. In some ways, the worst mistake a local politician can make is to act as though he or she is cooperating with the Mayor of Atlanta. I doubt that Roker or Brzenzinski  know the slightest thing about local governments in the metro-Atlanta region.

Keep my taxes low. More than a few of us tend to vote for the politician who will promise at least not to raise our taxes, if not make an out-right commitment to lower them. Of course every local government could purchase the necessary equipment to respond to the once-every-three-or-four-years snow event. But who wants to pay more in taxes to purchase said equipment? And, getting back to our DNA issues, who among us would trust them to spend the money appropriately even if we agreed to be taxed to pay for it?

Not in my back yard. Anyone living in the metro-Atlanta area knows we have transportation issues. But we continue to prefer long, often jammed up, commutes over  mass transit. MARTA can only take you so far and that “so far” is often “so far” from where we live, that only a small percentage of those who work in the City of Atlanta use it. Without better coverage by mass transit, there is no way the governor or the mayor can hope to stagger times for releasing people in a way that prevents the massive gridlock that we all saw happen Tuesday. My son-in-law made it from the Lenox area to College Park in a fairly timely fashion on the train – but it was hours before he made it home from the train station. Having been in major cities in both the US and abroad where mass transit is seen as a key transportation issue, I can’t help but think how differently events like Tuesday’s snow storm would themselves out if we weren’t so afraid that mass transit would allow the “wrong kind of people” to get to where we live. 

No win moments. It is pretty easy to place great blame on local school systems that chose to have students come to class on Tuesday. I’ve seen a lot of that on Facebook the past few days. Some of those same people who are now critical, were equally critical a few weeks ago when school systems cancelled and there was no snow – only very, very cold temperatures for southern heating systems to address. It is inconvenient for parents who work when school is not in session. We don’t want the systems shutting down, but when something like Tuesday happens, and it becomes inconvenient for parents for a different reason – we say the same things about the “idiots” who make those decisions. Honestly, in the “sue-happy” world we live in, I have a hard time imagining why anyone would want to be a school official who has to make these kinds of decisions. 

Of course my more snow-tested friends who live in other parts of the nation are correct when they observe that we southerners don’t know a lot about driving in the snow. How would we?  But if they will quit laughing at us long enough to observe the reality of Tuesday, it really wasn’t about driving skills. Most people sat in gridlock for hours at the time. Why? Because an event like Tuesday crashed our inadequate transportation grid. If you want to make fun of us, make fun of us for being so  utterly independent that we can’t allow elected officials to sit down and come up with a reasonable transportation solution – that includes extending  the rail system beyond Fulton and DeKalb – in ways that would actually come far closer to preventing the nightmare of Tuesday from happening again than any staggered release plan can have any hope to do. If that isn’t a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” reality, I’m not sure I would recognize one.