We have a total accumulation of 28-36 inches of snow today, but what puts this this storm at the top of the charts are the winds.  Last night we had 50 mph winds with gusts up to 70 mph and hurricane-force winds of 90 mph just off the coast where fishing boats are battling 15-30 foot seas. The National Weather Service provides the following weather forecast for Boston tonight:

"Tonight: Mostly cloudy with a chance of snow in the evening, then partly cloudy after midnight. Strong winds with lows around 10 above. north Winds 35 to 45 mph with gusts up to 60 mph, becoming northwest 20 to 30 mph with gusts up to 35 mph after midnight. Chance of snow 50 percent."

After shoveling through the wall of snow from my front door to the street, I walked the plowed street down to a local coffee shop where a couple of other patrons made it for their morning coffee. Marching through the drifts from street to store's front door filled my boots with the white stuff. I teased the 2 pleasant young men behind the counter for not having a path shoveled open from street to door and they replied in good humor, "Hey, we've already gone 'above and beyond' for opening the store. We don't have to be here!"

After consuming a cup of hot coffee and a bit of the Boston Globe, I offered to shovel a path open for other patrons as I left - if only they would let me use the store's shovel. The young man behind the counter replied, "I'm sorry but I can't let you do that because of liability".

As I trudged back home, I recalled the "The Great Appalachian Storm" in November, 1950 when I was just a boy, 7 years old.  It resulted in the deaths of 160 people in the northeast when we were buried in 30 inches of snow and pounded with record wind gusts in our small farming community in Western Pennsylvania. Our home lay among several others in the Mennonite farming community at the end of a one-mile stretch of state road that was closed with gigantic snow drifts. Huge V-Plows - the best road-clearing machinery of the day -  had blasted through the drifts until they were no longer able to keep up with the storm. The one-mile stretch of highway was closed and remained closed for weeks-on-end, as I recall. In those days, we and our neighbors all heated with the bituminous coal that is still local to that region of the country. One after another, we and other neighbors ran out of coal which we shared with one another until the shared community stock was near depletion.

One day my father and some of the neighboring men decided we had to hand-shovel the stretch of highway open to bring in what I recall to be a 20-ton load of coal.  So they contacted the coal mine in Jerome, PA, a couple of miles away, and told them we would open the road for a truck to deliver coal into the center of our community. I and my neighboring farm-boy friends were proud to help the strong farming men as we pushed through the snow to truck's point of arrival and hand-shoveled the truck into our farming community. The snow and winds blew the road shut again behind the truck as it advanced down the road to drop it's load on the ground in the middle of our community. We then shoveled the empty truck back out the stretch of road as the winds blew drifts of snow to shut the road again behind us.

For some, this story may sound like a terrible way to live, thankful that we no longer have to deal with such hardships, declaring that "the good ole' days were not so good!".  But I remember those days as a time when neighbor would help neighbor when in need without concern about liability or fear of being sued for personal injury.  It was a time when petty differences among folks were set aside in the interest of community, compassion and good will. We came into one another's homes to warm up by wood-fired kitchen stoves with hot chocolate, coffee and a hot meal.  We heard men and women tell their stories, and felt pride in our small temporal feats, battling the mighty natural forces of Pennsylvania winters. The work was never really done, but it was punctuated with play when we built snow-men, flew down "Ammon's Knob" on home-made skiis and careened on our sleds down mile-long "Pepper Hill" on a local road which the grown-ups would close to traffic for our fun.

This morning, when the young man at the coffee shop told me he couldn't allow me to shovel a narrow path this morning for reasons of liability and insurance, I commented, "It's sad that we have allowed the corporations to take away our neighborliness, helping one another and our sense of community". I noticed another patron nod "yes", as I spoke.

I also could not help but compare our winter experience in Boston today with the hardships of people in other places on the planet. I think of the people living in tents outside Fallujah after having experienced the man-made storm of U.S. aggression in the last 2 months. Having had their homes and city destroyed by U.S. missiles and bombs, I wonder how they must be doing what they can - to help one another in the midst of their ineffable hardship and suffering. I wonder about what stories they must be telling one another about their local heroes, about bombs dropping, loved ones and neighbors being shot and killed, family homes blown to bits and sharing their misery and heartbreak, supporting one another, weeping together and flooding one another with sympathy, love and compassion.

Of course our little problem with what will surely be dubbed, "The Great Blizzard of 2005" cannot be compared to the devastation with which the people of Iraq now live. But our loss of true spirituality that can be found only in community, compassion and helpfulness to one another - stands in stark contrast to that of people who continue to come together in solidarity for one another and against the invader ... the occupier ... the oppressor.

dir=ltr>In my mind, our little "sacrifices" of having to spend a day or two, snowed-in by the blizzard, stands in contrast to the real sacrifices of hunger, thirst, sickness, blood, limb and life in other places on earth like Iraq.

The corporate television media today is filled with interviews of people who are out there "braving the storm". They are even presenting anecdotal evidence of good will from time to time among members of the Boston community - a rare and welcome thing to see. But real help, neighbor-to-neighbor has been largely replaced with massive, efficient snow-removal systems, paid for by our property taxes as we sit at home, isolated from one another, watching the storm on television, happy that we "don't have to go out there".

A few years ago, a great-uncle of mine, a Mennonite and notable academic wrote a book about our relatives in the Amish community in Pennsylvania. He interviewed some of the Amish Elders and asked them about their mysterious and strange practices such as refusing to drive cars and have telephones in their homes.  One of the Amish men replied (paraphrase),

"Well you see, when if we drive down the road, riding in a motor car at 50 miles per hour, we would simply wave at a neighbor as we passed as they sit on the front porch. But when we pass by in our horse and buggy, we are going slowly enough to stop and talk to one another. If we had telephones, we would call them on the wire and talk to them. But without telephones, we have to go to one another's homes to visit and talk face-to-face."

I still have pictures of one of the great Mennonite "barn-raisings" at a neighbor's dairy farm within site of my boyhood home when a hundred men framed up the long, 3 story barn for the Ammon Yoder family. The photograph shows men mounted high up on the rafters putting up a new barn at no cost to their friend for labor. As a young boy of 8, I began working for Ammon, another great-uncle who, with his wife, Elda, raised a family of 11 on their 300 acre dairy farm. Ammon was totally deaf and had no ability to utter a word from birth. They created their own sign language which the neighbors learned in order to communicate with him.

I remember well the hard work of milking cows "by hand" in the morning and evening. In midsummer there was "making hay" in the fields and at harvest, the week when the Threshermen would come in with their huge belt-driven threshing machine, powered by work horses to separate the grain from the hand-cut shocks of wheat, oats and barley. Massive and wonderful meals, prepared by the women of several families in the community waited for us in great kitchens at lunch and dinner. When the time came around Thanksgiving week, relatives would come to help us butcher and can meat for winter's store. It was a time when people helped one another without thought of liability insurance or monetary payment for labor. Hard times, but good times. A few years ago, I attempted to capture the loss of those times in my poem, The Farm.

Frankly, I am somewhat embarrassed to attempt to draw a comparison between our spiritual losses in the United States with the devastation of the people of Iraq. Perhaps some would say that I should be embarrassed to do so and may view my recollections as mere sentimentality. Nonetheless,I cannot help but compare Boston's Great Blizzard of 2005 with the ongoing Blizzard of Devastation in Iraq. I cannot help but wonder which loss is greater - the loss of our community, character and compassion in the United States - or the unspeakable physical and material losses of the victims of an unprovoked war - resulting in the violent deaths and suffering of tens of thousands of Iraqi children, parents, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, loved ones and friends.

Soberly,

Les Blough, Editor
Axis of Logic
Boston, MA (USA)