Dispatch from the Eastern Seaboard: we're not all dead.

As many of you know, I am a Californian who teaches at the University of Iowa and is spending this year in Princeton.  This has, as you might expect, given me an odd perspective on weather disasters (other than just hating 'em), and the people who suffer them.  

East coast: weather service predicts apocalypse.  New York City shuts down. Citizens enraged. Subway continues running, empty, through the night by mandate of Higher Authority, while citizens, barred entry to the safety and transportation to be found underground, race home on foot against the doom awaiting them from the heavens.  Roads are barred to traffic.  Stores are cleared of bottled water and canned goods.  Some make their peace with god, others shake their fists and rage against the skies.  Battalions of snowplows and ambulances lie in wait, engines running and crews on DEFCON 1 ready to scramble at the drop of a snowflake. Brooklyn hipsters make incredibly detailed pre-looting strategy maps of record stores, consignment shops. Life insurance companies draft bankruptcy filings in advance, move assets to the Cayman Islands. Martha Stewart releases book of recipes for cannibals.  National guard activates plans to impose martial law.  Anyone who can flees to a bunker in the mountains with gold, guns.  Nothing happens.  

 

Midwest: weather service predicts nothing.  Apocalypse happens. The weakest immediately die.  Basketball-sized hail rains down from the skies, knocks anyone who ventures outside out cold, then blizzard covers all populated areas in five feet of snow, promptly freeze-suffocating hail victims.  Tornados descend by the dozens, clearing the snow as well as any inconveniently placed buildings.  People notice that frozen corpses appear to be scattered throughout the streets, midwestern tidiness kicks in, they go outside to stack them in neat piles.  Corpse-stackers immediately struck down by lightning, then buried in more snow, floods add layer of ice on top of snow, malarial mosquitos weaken the survivors, who are then dragged off by wolves.  Nobody else notices, survivors somehow manage to walk without slipping across the eternal icy mausoleum of half of their neighbors to give homemade jars of preserves to the other half.  Just because it's the neighborly thing to do.  

 

If one must have profoundly horribly weather and charmingly absurd people, can I please have the Midwest people with the East Coast weather?