The majority of the East Coast is, as u say, panicking about nothing - the snow is a minor inconvenience. But, there are exceptions.
In rural areas, like mine, we worry about power outages. Half a million households can be without power for days in a big storm. The infrastructure is crumbling due to inadequate maintenance (i.e. funding), and it will only get worse. So, we make sure our Honda generators are in good shape, stow our Toyotas in the garage, call each other on our Samsung smartphones to commiserate, fire up our Chinese-made computers to type great posts like this one, and wonder where all the jobs and money went.
Talking about money, the other class that worries legitimately about the snow is the homeless, whose number approaches a hundred thousand (will pass the million mark in a decade, with no end in sight). After a major storm, a few corpses will be found huddled under highway overpasses. The shelters are overflowing; down at "CrossRoads" people sleep sitting up on benches in the waiting room. Many are folks exactly like myself, minus the pension/retirement fund (often thru no fault of their own).
And then there are a lot of abandoned cats - their owners couldn't afford them anymore, the pound was full and couldn't take them - who did OK in the warm weather but won't make it thru this winter. Of course, not many count them - I'm weird in that regard.
When I get depressed by such considerations it helps to think of Bill Gates, Lloyd Blankfein and similar. Bill's closing in on 100 billion. He could make all those homeless people financially whole for the rest of their lives, and still have far more money than anyone could possibly need. Together with Lloyd and a few others, he could fix the infrastructure and they'd still be worth obscenely many billions. But that's not the point. I feel great thinking of them, because ... at least somebody's doing well! That thought always cheers me up immensely!
