To the city ‘leadership’ of Louisville and surrounding communities –

Dear Sir and/or Madam,

I am writing this to you as a stranger in your strange land. I have lived among you for quite some time, and I have this to say, and I say it with all the love and respect I can muster:

Please, for the love of God, get a grip.

It is December. December is, as we say up north, a winter month.

During the winter, it is not normal for it to rain. Rain in December is never a good thing. Normal weather, during this most chilly part of the year, is for the rain to freeze into what experts call ‘snow’.

Snow, being heavier than air, will fall from the sky. If it’s big snow, it floats down. If small, it comes down quite quickly.

But down it shall come, and that is both normal and a good thing.

How could frozen water coming down and covering the county in a layer of confusing white stuff that cannot be smoked, snorted, or injected for fun and profit be a good thing, I hear you ask.

Well, children, snow, being translucent, masks both the sight and smell of your more… savory bits of real estate here in Indiucky. Think of it as clean frosting spread across the ‘cake’ of Louisville.

If managed properly, it is not a danger, and should bring feelings of whimsy and wonder to children of all ages. You don’t get snow often enough, and what you do get melts off in a few days, for you to get that North Dakota “If one more flake either falls from the sky or asks me if I think it’ll warm up this week, I’m going to lose my everloving mind and end up on the 11 o’clock news” feeling.

You should enjoy these brief, infrequent episodes of real winter weather, not use them an example of the pending apocalypse.

Yes, the expected 3 to 5 inches of snow will snarl traffic. I’ll even agree that making the 4 AM decision to close schools, should the roads be as bad as your feverish imaginations think they will be, is a prudent measure in furtherance of public safety.

But calling school at 8 PM the night before, when the first bits of geometric ice art haven’t even fallen, leads me to make this request.

How are our children to learn what anticipation is when they go to bed knowing that tomorrow they can sleep in? Their futures will be less productive if they do not master the skill of getting up at 5:30 AM to find out whether or not they have to trudge out into the frozen wastes to catch the bus or if they can sit at home, eat sugary cereal, and watch cartoons all day?

Please, get a grip. Do it for the children.

Author’s note – If it’s just barely too cold for it to properly rain, and frozen water falls from the sky as little hard pellets, that’s ice, and I fully support proactive decisions. With the state of your infrastructure, it’s quite likely that power will be out come the morn, bringing about the collapse of your society for at least a few hours. When we’re fending off the hordes drawn to such chaos, we will not have time to listen to the whacky morning radio programs to see if the little darlings need to pack up their schoolbags instead of reloading magazines and preparing field dressings.