ON THE ROPES

What a week it has been in Montgomery County. We are surrounded by towering walls and mountains of snow, reminding us every time we go outside that government failed to provide the basic services we pay hefty taxes for.

In this episode now known as Snowgate 2010, your elected officials believed they were guaranteed to be reelected. They believed that they could gamble on squeaking by yet again through another mild winter storm season. And should a major storm hit, they could control the narrative through the local television, newspapers, and mainstream media web 1.0 websites.

When Gov. Martin O'Malley lost his cool, and lashed out angrily at the citizens of his own state, it was clear that their plan had failed.

It was you, the citizen, who broke through by speaking out.

Citizens like you, who reported what was really happening during and after the storm on new media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz.

Who called your county councilmembers, who described you as "irate," which hardly matched the feel-good, we're all in this together, igloo building, schools-closed, snowball-fighting, downhill sledding, we're-willing-to-wait-forever-for-a-plow megamessage the local TV and papers were blasting out there nearly 24 hours a day.

"What's it like out there, Tom?" "Still snow on the ground here. Back to you, Walter!"

Meanwhile, real people in the real world were texting and posting status updates: "no plow here yet" "What's going on?!" No electricity. No groceries. No buses. No trains. Impassable roads.

We pay taxes for this?

"Stop this!!," thundered O'Malley at the citizens of Maryland.

But you didn't stop, and now the truth is slowly emerging.

You're reading this blog right now because you realized you weren't getting the straight story from the local media. You knew government could and should do better in the aftermath of an entirely predictable winter storm event.

The voice of the people is rising in volume each day, becoming richer in tenor and timbre with each passing hour.

One man quoted in the Post said voters will forget this happened by Election Day. I beg to differ.

With so much snow left as a result of the county and state's failure to plow after storm 1, there may still be traces of it on the ground when voters go to the polls in November.

Thank you for making www.RobertDyer.net your source of the real story during this storm, and please return to find out, as always, what's really going on in Montgomery County.