The Parable of the Prognosticator

One day while teaching, Josh was asked, ”Teacher, are legislators in the Beltway even capable of appreciating the effects of their refusal to confront budgetary questions in an adult manner?”

Josh spoke thus:

A prognosticator was proud of his predictions.

“See!” the prognosticator said to the skeptics, “It is snowing.”

It was snowing very hard, just as the prognosticator had said it would.  

The prognosticator had told the skeptics that a gigantic winter storm was on the way.  The prognosticator had predicted snow accumulations of two feet and more.  The storm was not yet finished and more than three feet of snow had fallen.  There were snow drifts of four feet, five feet, even six feet.

The prognosticator had foretold gale-force winds.  Power lines, the prognosticator had warned, were in jeopardy; there was a great chance that a great many people would lose power.  Now the city was blacking out before the skeptics’ eyes.

The prognosticator had spoken of snow and wind combining to drop visibility to an arm’s length.  The skeptics’ vision was blocked for considerable spells of time.  Snow accumulations disappeared in walls of blasting ice, then reappeared in crystalline clarity.  The darkened city was whitened by snow blindness, then blackened again with sight.  Snow dunes migrated in stop-motion shifts.

Black crows, deep winter’s most stalwart denizens, flew backwards in the wind, their frosted fronts framing the birds like blurred auroras on photographic negatives.  Pre-spring robins, red breasts grey with sleet; optimistic starlings, plunged deep into embankments; noisily complaining geese; silently stoic hawks welded in the lower reaches of the sky to barren steely branches, all suffered for their ignorance of prognostication’s arts.

Their speedometers thrashing to their clockwise limits, their tires’ treads packed smooth with ice, their wheels violently swirling in helpless hurricanes, cars, trucks, and vans heaved into the untrustworthy currents of ruts and unpredictable eddies of snow drifts, thrashing their tails and mimicking locomotion.

Pedestrians surged and rested, surged and rested, bent like guilty pilgrims into the wind.  Street lamps, unrepentant, challenged the gale, some succeeding, some too weak to resist relentless winter.

For spite of coming spring, the season was thrashing its death throws and punishing the world for its demise.

“It happens every year,” the prognosticator said smugly, “You know it’s coming.”

The skeptics agreed, except for one challenger, who stood and said, “You said it would come, but it didn’t.”

“Of course it did,” the prognosticator said, still smug, “Look at it there, on the television.”

“Yes, on the television,” the challenger said, “The storm is hundreds of miles away.”

The prognosticator replied, “That’s the best part.”