Why Snow Doesn’t Faze Me, aka A Colorado Christmas
Received this in a mass email to the ENTIRE COMPANY from a coworker a few years ago. This particular coworker was a saleswoman, attractive, and completely useless save for the fact that she was married to one of the company’s co-CEO’s. I won’t give away too many details, other than to say that it’s a business process modeling firm headquartered in Colorado…
___________________________________________________________
From:
Sent: Fri 1/5/2007 1:23 PM
To: _All
Subject: FW: Colorado Christmas- no FEMA
Amen!
Colorado Christmas
WEATHER BULLETIN — Denver – December 2006 – Christmas
Up here, in the “Mile-Hi City”, we just recovered from a Historic event—
May I even say a “weather event of biblical proportions” — with a
historic blizzard of up to 44″ inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that
broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of
motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of
communities and cut power to 10′s of thousands.
FYI:
George Bush did not come.
FEMA did nothing.
No one howled for the government.
No one blamed the government.
No one even uttered an expletive on TV.
Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton did not visit.
Our Mayor did not blame Bush or anyone else.
Our Governor did not blame Bush or anyone else, either.
CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX or NBC did not visit this category 5
snowstorm. Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards.
No one asked for a FEMA mobile home.
No one looted.
Nobody – I mean NOBODY demanded the government do something.
Nobody expected the government to do anything, either.
No Larry King, No Bill O’Rielly, No Oprah, No Chris Mathews and No Geraldo
Rivera.
No Shaun Penn, No Barbara Striesand, No Hollywood types to be found.
Nope, we just melted the snow for water.
Sent out caravans of SUV’s to pluck people out of snow engulfed cars.
The truck drivers pulled people out of snow banks and didn’t ask for a
penny.
Local restaurants made food and the police and fire departments delivered
it to the snowbound families.
Families took in the stranded people – total strangers.
We fired up wood stoves, broke out coal oil lanterns or Coleman lanterns, even cooked on the Bar-B-Que (once we unburied it).
We put on extra layers of clothes because up here it is “Work or Die”.
We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a
mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trades votes
for ‘sittin at home’ checks.
Even though a Category “5″ blizzard of this scale has never fall en this
early, we accept that it can happen and understand we have to know how to deal with it ourselves.
“In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 48
degrees North Latitude, 90% of the world’s social problems evaporate.”
It does seem that way, at least to me.
I hope this gets passed on.
Maybe SOME people (Like New Orleans and Wash. DC freeloaders) will get the message. The world does Not owe you a living. The Government and Tax $ are not your insurance company. In the West, people help people just because we are neighbors and it is the thing we do. Think about it.
___________________________________________________________
Several people, including my regional sales manager, immediately informed her that she had crossed that line, especially given that the company included an employee who had fled Katrina (me). She half-heartedly apologized via another email blast, but that didn’t stop me from giving it to her with both barrels (and a chainsaw, Evil Dead style).
Here was my response:
___________________________________________________________
From:
Sent: Fri 1/5/2007 2:31 PM
To:
Cc:
Subject: RE: Colorado Christmas- no FEMA
[Useless Saleswoman],
As a New Orleans native, I take deep offense to this. If New Orleanians could have frozen the 7-20 feet of floodwaters that inundated 80% of the Metro New Orleans area and made frozen margaritas, I think they would have done so. New Orleans loves a good party as much as anyone.
I applaud Denver’s “pioneer spirit”, as [Account Manager] likes to call it, but to celebrate that spirit at the expense of hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced from their homes (including me) is simply cruel. I know you didn’t create this email, but you can do a great service to your fellow human beings by not forwarding it on. I’m attaching a copy of a picture that was taken 2-3 days after the hurricane rolled ashore in Louisiana. This picture was taken less than a half mile from the condo I own in New Orleans. And yes, those are the roofs of houses that you see in the background, the rest of the houses submerged in flood waters. That water wouldn’t subside for over a week, in some cases. So I think that’s great that the good folk of Colorado hunkered down and weathered the storm, but that wasn’t exactly possible for those of us who lived through the hurricane. And we were the lucky ones. Over 1,800 unlucky people didn’t survive the storm, and quite a few of those drowned in their own homes.
I’m not aware of any Blizzard Protection System in existence today, unlike the federally-funded flood protection system maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. Those levees, designed to withstand a Category 3 storm, buckled under the surges of what was a Category 2 storm by the time it hit the city. This occurred less than a year after Congress failed to fund a study recommended by the Army Corps Project Manager to develop a plan for shoring up the levees. They declined to fund the study, citing the lack of available funds due to the Iraq War. So I think New Orleanians have a right to point fingers in the direction of DC. The snow will be gone in a few months. Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast 16 months ago, and much of the area hasn’t been rebuilt, and many of the residents in the area still haven’t been paid by their insurance companies. It’s easy to select the worst of what happened after the storms – the looting, the misuse of FEMA funds, the ignorant and desperately poor people on TV screaming for help – when you haven’t lived through it.
And I think I take the most offense to this passage:
Even though a Category “5″ blizzard of this scale has never fall en this early, we accept that it can happen and understand we have to know how to deal with it ourselves.
When you figure out a way to deal with 7 feet of snow INSIDE your home, let me know. I’ll be all ears.
