Snowmaggedon and slavery

Well, Snowmaggedon 2026 did not pan out. At least not as snow.

SLEETmageddon? Different story.

I’m kind of disappointed in some ways, actually.

Wouldn’t it have been interesting, just a year after we equalled or slightly surpassed the old one-day snowfall record for any date, to shatter it by 3 or 4 inches?

Of course, that combined with the coldest temperatures since Winter Storm Uri five years ago, would have led to other “interesting” things.

First would have been, would the Texas electric grid hold up this time?

Second would have been, who would Dan Patrick blame this time if it didn’t?

Third would have been, would the Texas Department of Transportation been broken instead of the electric grid ant the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, aka ERCOT?

I’m not throwing any shade at TxDOT plows or salt, sand and brine trucks. But, if we had gotten the early forecast worst-case scenario of 5 inches of snow on Friday followed by a foot on Saturday, there’s no way they could have fully kept up, as I see it.

So, WHY did we not get a foot of snow?

I think the answer is probably primarily due to one reason, the same reason the local County Commissioners Court declared a burn ban Jan. 12.

It’s too dry.

That breakthrough of the “polar vortex” was certainly strong enough, looking at how cold it got.

But in front of it, on the ground here in north Texas, and weather patterns from further south? There just wasn’t the ready moisture available to generate that much precipitation.

So, why did the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it’s subagency of the National Weather Service, and private forecasters like the Weather Channel or Weather Underground, not get it right earlier? (There’s big bucks in private forecasting, by the way. Weather Underground used to be owned by IBM; both companies are now owned by the same vulture capitalist private equity firm.)

I mean, this is not Troy Dungan and David Finfrock of long-ago Metromess TV news, dueling over weather porn and eyeballs.

I was worried, though.

And, I thought I would keep myself stocked up on food the easy way.

So, I figured I would pre-order a Domino’s pizza delivery for once every 4 hours during waking hours, from Friday evening through Sunday morning.

And, to make sure it would get delivered, I figured I would also pre-purchase a Domino’s delivery driver at a Uber slave market or something.

Wait, what? You can’t say that, can you?

Having just read a book of essays by the dean of Reconstruction historians, Eric Foner, yeah, my mind wandered a bit.

But, just think.

TxDOT could have plantation labor running the snowplows, maybe in conjunction with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice sending out convict labor. TxDOT wouldn’t “break” at all.
(I hear nervous laughter somewhere in the background.) The only thing that might upset this is small-government plantation owners not wanting their state governments to own slaves.

Picture Uber drivers, or food delivery drivers in general, at a slave labor pen next to fast food restaurants all in a cluster. Like next door to one another in Charleston, South Carolina. Or next door to one another just off the Mall and just down the road from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

(I hear more nervous laughter.)

OK, I will stop going down the road of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”

But, there is a reason I did that abrupt switch.

Martin Luther King Day was earlier this month, in the middle of Black History Month. Too often, in my book, he gets too sanitized, including one famous phrase quoted out of context of the rest of the “I Have a Dream” speech. (At least the speech hasn’t been totally eviscerated by some “teach the opposing viewpoint” idea, like Carroll ISD and the Holocaust a few years ago, which was even before the most recent changes in Texas education guidelines.)

Let’s not yet turn away from this issue.

In the 1850s, many northern Democrats, trying to split the difference on slavery, supported the idea of popular sovreignty, or settlers in organized federal territories choosing on their own whether to be free territories, or slave territory, before statehood.

People like Stephen A. Douglas reassured people in Illinois that the west was way too dry to support plantation slavery.

Either a silly man or a lucky man was he.

After the canals started being built in Southern California, then after people started cheating on maximum farm size allowed by the Bureau of Reclamation, then cheating again after the law was loosened up, the hue and cry for foreign agricultural workers started.

It was the likes of Japanese and Filipinos at first. Then Mexicans, later augmented by other Hispanics from yet further south.

What if slavery were still around?

Don’t you think that many California corporate farmers would push for a change in the state’s “free-soil” status?