Throughout the Midwest came warning about essential driving. A major snowstorm covering several states at a time was predictable and did arrive. It turned out the expectation of multi-vehicle accidents arrived on schedule and resulted in hours and hours of delay.
It turns out that essential travel is quite mutable. My desire to move on is essential, and your desire is not.
The question of a day’s delay seems not to have a place to land. A desire, not always recognizable, has come to mean it must be fulfilled. Passion has become the contemporary arbiter of “freedom.” A delay or denial of a desire is tantamount to a reason to break solidarity with one another and claim a privileged position or power.
Along with a right to travel in a windy whiteout comes easy access to plausible deniability and a first strike of blame. If we had been alone on the road, there wouldn’t have been a pile-up demanding evasive action and becoming stuck in a ditch.
Since we do not have the power to claim independence when roads are obviously constructed communally, it can only be said that we are a particularly myopic people.
In the tenor of the day – it must be that we were conspired against. Otherwise, we wouldn’t now be sitting here awaiting a long-overdue tow truck to get us on our way and into a next, surprise!, delay.
“Snow falls and builds up around the righteous and the unrighteous” – there is no special dispensation. May it sometime come to this: A recognition of no-exemption from the consequences of entitlement is a warning bell leading to a rethinking of desire’s limits.