Snow People

Earlier in the week, on the eve of the certification of the presidential election, the largest blizzard in three years hit Washington, D. C. and left in its wake 8.3 inches of snow. I realize that isn’t much compared to, say, Buffalo, which got six inches an hour – and not all that many years ago had to dig out from under seven feet. But it’s more than enough to bring the nation’s capital to a standstill.

Nobody down there ever seems prepared for that kind of weather. When my son-in-law discovered he did not have a snow shovel, he slogged up to the hardware store, which, naturally, had run out of them. Along the way he heard some kids say they were going to build a “snow person.” This was a new word to me. I know the word snowman (he, him), of course – and, less familiarly, snowwoman (she, her). Indeed, when I was a younger man, I aspired to be a snowman, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as a “male who easily wins the affections of females;” alas, it was not to be. Of a snowperson (they, them), however, I had never heard until this week.

I smile as I think that words such as this are going to drive Stephen Miller crazy. For the incoming anti-woke tzar, snowman seems almost the perfect word. Not only is there the gender part (man); there is also the pigmentation part (snow). I feel confident that the snowperson people are up to the challenge of correcting the first syllable as well as the second. I came up with “frozen water person,” but it sounded like something an early Hollywood screenwriter would name a member of a Sioux raiding party in a third-rate cowboy movie: “How. Me Frozen Water Person. Pony soldiers give us blankets, make us sick.”

Still, perhaps the sight of frozen water people popping up all over Washington after the next blizzard will distract Miller from his other job: rounding up immigrants for mass deportations. Will he spend so much time chasing down these kinds of woke issues that it will slow his national eviction policies? Worse things could happen. But we had better not count on it. We would do better to heed the words Andrew Prokop wrote last month in Vox: “It would be a mistake to underestimate Miller’s fanatical commitment to getting as far toward that goal [deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants] as he can. He is on a mission – this has been the driving cause of his adult life.”

No, we need ourselves to stand up for the values – tolerance, empathy, humanity – on which Americans once prided ourselves.

Or, to borrow from a character in Patricia McGerr’s 1967 novel, Murder is Absurd, “You're a great snow man, [Stephen]. But I'm not in dreamland yet.”