Wearing a pom pom hat and mittens and shovel in hand, a smiling Michelle Wu is trying to convince residents that the massive snow mounds plaguing city streets are not a bad thing, but a joyful experience.
“This is winter, this is New England and there will be snow piles,” the ever cheerful Boston mayor said Wednesday morning while helping shovel out a Mattapan elementary school’s sidewalks.
Her Orwellian strategy of telling people don’t believe your eyes, believe what you’re told, comes after she received blowback from residents after the first storm in January paralyzed the city for days.
In the aftermath of that storm, Wu’s public works department failed to get rid of the snow fast enough to unclog side streets and sidewalks, leaving pedestrians and motorists navigating a dangerous situation in Boston for days.
This time the Democratic mayor was more prepared and changed her strategy, choosing to portray the snow as a necessary but joyous occasion.
Wu released videos on social media platforms set to peppy music and showing her riding a snowplow and her young son making a snowman. The city also hosted snow shoveling “meet ups” in which neighbors helped neighbors to shovel out.
Her public works department also did a better job of getting rid of the white stuff, sending out hundreds of trucks to take it to the city’s snow farms.
But it was her positive attitude that was most notable – a stark contrast to the dour-faced Democrats who shouted and glared at President Donald Trump during his State of the Union address.
Wu is showing her fellow party leaders – who by the way will be helping pick a presidential and vice presidential nominee in 2028 – that you don’t need to be a grumpy Debbie Downer all the time.
Even when she is attacking Trump and defending Boston, she does it with a knowing smile.
Now post-blizzard, Wu is trying to make what everyone else sees as a difficult situation – with pedestrians trapped and unable to get through the tiny pathways that used to be sidewalks – an opportunity to glow, making it seem like all the residents are at a Winterfest.
It’s a positive spin to the extreme – like saying that a hurricane is a great time to fly a kite.
Wu is taking a page literally out of George Orwell’s “1984,” in which the totalitarian government – led by the Ministry of Truth and the Thought Police – tells citizens that “war is peace” and “ignorance is strength.”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” writes Orwell.
Orwell and Wu also seem to be fans of Doublethink, which means “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
In Boston now, that means looking at the huge mountains of dirty snow and Wu’s smiling proclamation that snow is fun and accepting both beliefs.
Maybe that’s how she got re-elected with over 70% of the vote.
