Now that we’ve all settled in to weather the storm, made it through the traffic, and thawed out the starving, urine-soaked children, it’s time to reflect on the way Rhode Islanders reacted with characteristic aplomb and grace under fire to a winter storm that, while unusual in its speed and intensity, is not entirely outside our normal frame of reference.

Seriously, what the fuck happened yesterday?

Perhaps these mild winters we’ve been having for the past few years have made us a bit soft, because as Al Gore stood before the world wagging his finger at his own country for not doing enough about climate change, the climate here changed right back and we were all caught a bit off guard. What happened to us? I distinctly remember a winter when I was in high school and we got so much snow that the plows were running out of places to put it, and never once do I recall a traffic jam the likes of which we saw yesterday. Moses had an easier time leading the Jews out of Egypt than I did getting home from work. Were we running FEMA’s Katrina playbook? Was Michael Brown put in charge of RIDOT?

At the intersection of Broadway and Dean St. in Providence, I personally witnessed a display of incompetence, pig-headedness, and unwillingness to change course that up until recently would have netted you an appointment to Attorney General. As a van broke down crossing the intersection one way, two cars lined up behind it, then sat stunned for ten straight minutes in the middle of the road blocking traffic in all directions before deciding to turn and go the other way.

And God help the children. The children! After school got out around 1, some buses didn’t get children home until almost 9 o’clock. How mad would you be if your children were stuck at the Thurbers Ave. curve in a snowstorm for eight hours? Can you imagine being the poor schmuck who has to answer the phone when Donna from Johnston calls to find out why there’s a foot of snow on the ground and she hasn’t seen her god damn kid since 7 a.m.? Does anything so closely resemble hell on earth like being a bus driver stuck on the highway in a snowstorm with thirty fourth-graders who haven’t gone to the bathroom in six hours? After hour three, I’d flip one of the kids my cell phone and tell him to call for a ride because I’d be under the bus sucking on the exhaust pipe. The ProJo is already soliciting requests for stories from parents of gridlocked children, so expect this one to fly completely off the handle.

Let’s all hope this debacle serves as a wakeup call and we learn to try to prevent the fabric of society from splitting at the seams as soon as trouble rolls into town. God forbid we ever had to stage a mass evacuation like New Orleans before Katrina; the chaos and disorder would make the Riverfront Coliseum during a Who concert look like that prison in the Philippines where the prisoners do the dance from “Thriller.”

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