I don’t intend to downplay the serious implications, hazards, and consequences of the double snowstorm that hit the Washington, DC area and the East Cost of the country in these last few days in February. I admit that the massive snowfalls are not very common to this area, and people, as well as local authorities, may feel inadequate and ill-prepared for this kind of nature showdown. But I do think that the public and the media has blown it way out of proportion when they nicknamed this Blizzard 2010 snowpacalypse and snowmageddon.
My suspicion is that these names were coined and put to wide circulation by persons who had not had real hardships in their life. Probably the biggest “calamity” they had ever personally endured was running low on toilet paper, chips and salsa. Make a note: they have not actually run out of those “life bare necessities”. They just got intimidated by the very thought of running low on those “essentials of life”.
When people use loosely and frivolously quite grave terms it makes the whole value paradigm shift. Take a lighter example with my cat. My cat comes to my bedroom almost every morning and starts meowing. She does it before my regular wake up time, not because she really cares about my not being late for work. She is just trying to get me out of bed to feed her. She also does this on weekends, when she knows very well that I have no work to go to on those days. It is quite irritating for me when I try to catch the last moments of sleep or just to sleep-in on weekends after doing readings for my MBA classes well into the morning hours. My reluctance to indulge her hunger feats is exacerbated by the fact, that she is already an obese cat, and I have been trying to control her food intake. Anyways, I used to call her a mean cat because of this. I thought I did not really mean that, I just called her mean half-jokingly.
Then recently my daughter told me that it was not really nice to call the cat mean. She said that she was at the most obnoxious, but not really mean by any measure. When I gave it a thought I realized that my daughter was right. I stopped calling the cat mean every time she woke me up too early in the morning. And soon I noticed that my general attitude to the cat changed. I started to treat her more like a family member, instead of just a pet in the house. Being obnoxious, I guess, is OK for cats sometimes. I am still less tolerant to obnoxious people though, as they do know better 
Back to the snowpacalypse. We all know that there are much more serious and deadly nature-induced events: earthquake in Haiti, earthquake in China 2008, Hurricane Katrina, Asian tsunami of 2004, to mention just a few most recent that come to mind. So, for all those snowmageddon preachers here is an advice: save your epithets for better use, and keep enough toilet paper on hand at all times, not to be embarrassed at the next snowfall.
I came up with mypersonal unofficial snow wimps index. On the scale from 0-10, where zero means snow heroes, and ten means complete snow wimps. Of course, It should be taken only half-seriously
Snow heroes:
0 - hospital personnel, firefighters, police, and public utilities emergency response services (power, water, etc)
1 – snow plowers
Snow hustlers:
2 - TV crews and staff working to cover the storm and provide news
3 – staff at supermarkets, and othe stores and restaurants that kept working through all or most of the storm
4 – Bloomingdale’s. The local stores were announcing closing on storm days only at ten in the morning, as they were hoping to be able to open, even if late.
Snow wimps:
5 - federal government agencies. Announcements about closings were coming the night before. Cumulatively, federal agencies were closed since Friday afternoon last week till today.
8 - local county public schools. They announced already on Tuesday that will be closed through the end of the week. I will not be surprized if they stay closed part of the next week too. With this school closings my kids will have to go to school till the 4-th of July this summer. Good by summer vacations
9 - shoppers hording food at the stores
10 - honorary category in its own rite: toilet paper snatchers.
Again, this is my personal and unofficial index. Feel free to nominate others to expand the list
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