"We used to be made of sterner stuff."
I remember my old neighbor Mike saying that wistfully around the butt of a half-smoked cancer stick one evening as we stood on the front porch of my half of the duplex I lived in in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston. Mike was lamenting the recent passage of a city-wide ban on smoking in bars in Boston. Of course, as the aforementioned cigarette will have hinted, Mike was in large part concerned with the imposition that the ban put on his ability to enjoy a cigarette with his Guinness while perched atop a stool at the James Gate pub just down the street. But what Mike was concerned with more than that, and what his comment really alluded to, was more of an attitudinal thing, a degeneration of American backbone, a propensity to roll over and let the wiser parents of the government have their way.
See, the majority of Boston bar patrons -- and employees, by the way -- preferred smoking in bars. The majority of patrons were smokers, of course, and die hard smokers at that, as could be observed on many a winter night in Faneuil Hall when smokers poured outside into the freezing cold to feed their habits while the bands were on break. Many of the employees were smokers as well, but their opposition wasn't so much about freedom to smoke as it was about the dent that having more than half of their clientele standing outside the bar half of the time was putting in their tips. But despite this majority opposition, the citizens of Boston, the heirs of a group of people who dressed up like a bunch of natives and dumped a payload of tea into the harbor because the king's tax was a few cents too high, were just going to roll over and take it. The Irish gals would stand outside and suffer all winter long, freezing in their spaghetti straps while they sucked on their coffin nails, all because, as Mike put it, Mayor Menino was an eating man, not a drinking man, and didn't want to be bothered by second hand smoke while he enjoyed his lunch.
I imagine two questions are in the minds of many of my readers about now. One, why would I -- a non-smoker, unless you count the occasional cigar -- seem to be objecting to the passage of a law that is clearly to the health benefits of everyone and to the definite benefit of bar patrons not given to an ill-advised vice? And two, what does any of this have to do with the picture of the high-piled snow in my court at the top of this column?
The answer to both questions is encapsulated in the sentiment behind Mike's quote that I opened with. "We used to be made of sterner stuff." That is to say, we used to have an indomitable individual will that was part of our identity as Americans. We did for ourselves. We'd be damned if anyone was going to tell us what to do, whether it was good for us or not. We were free and self-determining. And self-doing. While we always appreciated neighbors and were willing to help each other out, if necessary, we were quite capable of -- and sometimes intent on -- being a society unto ourselves. Both sides of this sentiment of will -- the will to do for ourselves and be free -- are expressed by Charlie Daniels in the chorus of "Long Haired Country Boy": "I ain't askin' nobody for nothin' if I can't get it on my own. If you don't like the way I'm livin', you just leave this long haired country boy alone."
Which brings me to Winter Storm Jonas. The flip side of letting the GOV tell us what to do is depending on the GOV to do for us. As you can see from the pictures above, Jonas dumped quite a lot of snow on the East Coast as it rolled through, setting records in Maryland and Pennsylvania. It had to come pretty close to a record in Northern Virginia too. Predictably, it crippled the region. How could it not? Roads are still being cleared, and as I was writing the previous sentence, I received the text that let me know that Fairfax County Public Schools will be closed tomorrow for the fourth day (and counting). Most of that is to be expected. Northern Virginia is not Buffalo. The area doesn't usually get anywhere near this kind of snowfall and doesn't have the infrastructure to clear it quickly. I'm not necessarily launching a complaint here about government response to the storm -- although the school closings here are historically absurd. What I'm more taken aback by is the attitude of the denizens of the East Coast to the storm. To wit, look at the picture below, taken by a Reston, VA shopper at our local Trader Joes.
This isn't a store under new construction that hasn't received its goods yet. It's a store whose dairy supply has been completely emptied in preparation for a winter storm. Yes, it was a big storm, but when I look at this scene, I think we're preparing for nuclear winter, not actual winter. I mean, yeah, it'll be a couple of days before you can go to the store, but don't we regularly do that all the time anyway? This scene is rather indicative of what the prevailing attitude towards the storm seems to have been. Hunker down and wait it out. Not wait until it stops blizzarding, by the way, but wait until Uncle Sam has plowed the roads back to where they are typically in mid-June and gives us the all clear to proceed with life as usual. The all-clear was apparently a necessity in New York, whether individuals wanted it to be or not. Supposedly Bill de Blasio threatened to arrest anyone who was out on the roads in a non-official capacity. I get that some of that is for cleanup, but the press conference made it sound like part of it was saving people from their own-- what? stupidity? or is it gumption? self-reliance? lack of fear? Lucky for de Blasio, most of the NYC populace was probably too happy to stay inside and wait on the civil apparatus. What would we do if we lived in Barrow, Alaska?
Again, we used to be made of sterner stuff. We used not to be so cowed by something like the weather. There used to be some honor in being able to overcome obstacles and some shame in being defeated by them. Our dads were heroes in our eyes, capable of anything, and sons wanted to grow up to be just like them. That sort of local heroism was a specific American thing, by the way. The indomitable will of the hero has been part of the Western mythos since Achilles and Odysseus, but across the Atlantic, you had to be an aristocrat -- of a certain bloodline -- to be heroic. Here in America, it was available to everyone.
I'm not necessarily saying it's exactly heroic to dig your car out of the snow (though it might make your back hurt), or that it's heroic to drive to the store on less-than-perfect roads, or that it's heroic to do a number of other things like it (change your own tire, build a fire, cook without a recipe, etc. etc.), but the capability to do any of these things -- the capability to do for oneself -- is certainly more heroic than the alternative.*
We used to be made of sterner stuff. We didn't surrender to something so silly as a winter storm. The indomitable will used to be a virtue. I'm put in mind of Tennyson's poem "Ulysses." Ostensibly, it's a poem about the Greek hero Odysseus (Roman name Ulysses) in his retirement, but in essence, it's a paean to the indomitable human will. I feel like internalizing some of it will do us some good.
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
So driving on an icy road isn't exactly striving with gods. Still, I feel like we'd be better off if there were more embracing of the heroic ethos that says we'll do for ourselves and less of the prudent foresight that says I'll stockpile 14 gallons of milk and 8 dozen eggs and wait for civil servants to plow me out.
*Hopefully, it goes without saying that I'm exempting the usual suspects from the shame that might attach to inability here: children, the elderly, and even the fairer sex (apologies to my feminist friends for mentioning the last; I by no means mean to imply that a gal shouldn't be able to shovel herself out, too).
No comments:
Post a Comment