"My children's school was canceled today, because of what? Some ice," Obama said, and all at the table started laughing. "As my children pointed out, in Chicago school is never canceled," he continued. He said that in their old hometown, "you'd go outside for recess in weather like this. You wouldn't even stay indoors." The President said he would have to bring "some flinty Chicago toughness" to Washington. Asked if he was calling Washingtonians wimps, Obama responded: "I'm saying that when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things."
So, so true. I lived in Connecticut until I was 12 and then upstate New York through college, and it's just sad the way school gets cancelled here in DC every time the National Weather Service forecasts a 5 percent possibility of light flurries. An inch or more of snow and civilization itself immediately lurches toward post-apocalyptic chaos with all kinds of public institutions shutting down, cars careening off the road, and hordes of people descending on supermarkets to stock up on bread even though we live in a densely populated city with access to major interstate highways and rail lines and as such there is no chance whatsoever that we're going to run out of food. In four years of high school in Schenectady, New York, where it drops below freezing around Thanksgiving and stays that way until Easter, school was cancelled exactly once and the superintedent endured all kinds of grief about it because all we got was a measly six inches of ice. When I was in Finland last month, I visited a day care center where four-year old children play outside in sub-freezing weather for three hours every morning, and the Finns have the highest test scores in the world. Clearly there's just a basic underlying weakness of character in this part of the country which in turn explains all kinds of other things.
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