The Snowpocalypse

I am from Georgia. About as South as you can get in the United States, before hitting Florida (which we don't count as the South, anyways.) As you can imagine, it rarely snows where I'm from. (You can imagine my shock when I first moved to Utah.) And when it does snow, due to the lack of of snowplows, salt machines, and any other gadget that would help clear up the roads, the entire city, nay, the entire state, shuts down - even for just a small flake or two. Georgia has still had its experiences with a few bad snow storms - the city shuts down, grocery stores are ravaged, and the greater Atlanta area looks mostly like a ghost town. In these instances, Southerners, who don't know what to do about snow that actually sticks to the ground, tend to freak out about where their next meal is going to come from. If the roads are blocked and the stores are empty, how are they going to get food? (Shameless plug for food storage.)

Last year in 2014, Georgia experienced one of the worst snow storms in the state's history. "Tuesday's storm, the beginning of mass hysteria," "Ordinary commutes turned into chaos and confusion," were only a few of the headlines that graced the papers that week, and the storm quickly gained the name of the "Snowpocalypse." Atlanta's few major highways were all closed due to dangerous and icy conditions, and after being stuck on the roads for more than 24 hours, people abandoned their cars and literally started walking along the side of the highway to seek shelter. The city was compared to a scene from the hit TV show, "Walking Dead."

I was at home visiting and happened to be with my mother in a local grocery store, where we saw two women start to catfight over what was left of the milk in the dairy isle. When the first slap was thrown, my own fearful mother quickly grabbed my hand and we left. A store worker ended up breaking the two women up, but no one else said anything because everyone was in the same boat. They were all desperate for milk.

Though the weather conditions in Georgia were bad at that time and everyone had to stay in due to the major traffic jam on the roads, I knew eventually it would clear up. It scared me to think how crazy some people could get over minor things when they thought the world was going to end, or more specifically, their world. This mob mentality seems to be prevalent even in some of the nicest, hospitable, small Southern towns like Dacula, Georgia.