Commentary
How much would you estimate that a wall of snow and ice roughly two and a half feet high, four feet wide, and 10 feet long weighs? I ask because the City of Ottawa just bestowed one upon me yet again, completely blocking my driveway yet again, and I’m trying to figure out how exactly to thank them.
I did phone to ask whether they were clearing snow that day. But as it was the weekend most bureaucrats were not working, unlike the peasants toiling in stores, restaurants, and so forth whose trip to their place of employment they had just systematically rendered impossible yet again.
Now you may say they’ve done it for decades in most cities with significant snow so get used to it. Or that with all the troubles in the world, from crowds in our cities cheering Hamas for raping and murdering Israelis for being Jewish and
Houthi rebels for firing missiles at American warships to cripple world trade until someone kills all the Jews, to inflation creeping up and government debt soaring, it is very petty of me to write about this topic. Or you may object that
I already did so in another publication on March 16, 2017.
If you raised the last point, well, thanks for remembering. But here’s the thing. It is true that there are a lot of bigger issues. Including, I must mention, security technologist Bruce Schneier’s
recent observation that “The classical definition of a robot is something that senses, thinks, and acts – that’s today’s Internet. We’ve been building a world-sized robot without even realizing it.” Meanwhile the people in charge of our society think that, instead of any of these things, it is humans releasing trace quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere that is our big threat to ourselves (and means it doesn’t snow anymore). But even exciting lives consist mostly of many small things, and if they consistently don’t go well we do not flourish.
It’s also true that
having a fatal heart attack while desperately trying to clear that gosh-you-shouldn’t-have wall of ice in time to dash to work it is not a small thing. And many people do because (a) they rush into it because they are in a hurry and a temper, (b) some of us are not as young as we were decades ago, and (c) by my calculation that immense barrier weighed more than two tons. (At the density of water 100 cubic feet would weigh three tons, but some was fluffy though I had to smash other bits with an axe.) And tossing heavy scoops of such stuff about causes dangerous blood pressure spikes.
A
helpful Ottawa Citizen article two years ago said the best way to avoid cardiac arrest while shovelling snow was not to shovel snow. But if you must, warm up first, take frequent rests, and “if you have to do it, ideally, you’re not lifting. You’re pushing it to the side.” Sort of tricky when the massive wretched thing extends all down the street and you’re in a desperate hurry.
As for repeating myself, I fancy that my National Post piece covered it pretty nicely, including that contracting it out on a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood basis would save money and the people we hired would plough the street then, very quickly, follow up by clearing driveways. Indeed, my neighbours mostly hire private firms to do the latter. But forcing people pay extra to fix a problem the government deliberately gratuitously caused, or risk death fixing it themselves, rather increases inequality, something I thought politicians and bureaucrats hated. Including discriminating against the elderly and the handicapped along with the poor and the unshovelled.
So my excuse for returning to the topic isn’t to offer new insights on the basic phenomenon. On the contrary, it’s to note that despite the solutions being obvious, nothing whatsoever has been done to implement them. Not even posting notices online about whether the city is plowing that day, clearing snow, or both. I would feel like a chump if I died shovelling it all only to have trucks immediately show up. And I notice that private firms, again, are willing to tell you what they’re up to even on weekends. You can reach Canadian Tire or a plumber. Just not the City.
So here’s the punchline. If governments dealing with a thoroughly familiar problem, snow in winter, have done something stupidly obnoxious for decades and won’t fix it or even talk to you about it, maybe they should rein in some of their more ambitious projects. Forget changing the weather, our genders and the whole basis of our economy, our morals and our society, and try to understand why putting an infuriating, lethal wall of ice right across everybody’s driveway isn’t something to boast about.
Or keep doing.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
