I’m neither a fan nor hater of New York City Mayor Eric Adams. It’s not that he’s doing a good job, but then, it’s not as if any recent mayor has done a better job. But despite his being a  black man and a Democrat, he’s not the “right” sort of black man or Democrat as far as the progressive wing of the party is concerned, which makes him as blameworthy as a MAGA wingnut. But for a flood?

As the storm approached last week, Mr. Adams failed to adequately warn the public. Worse, the mayor seems to have suggested in the hours and days since that doing so was not his job.

“If anyone was caught off guard, they had to be living under a rock,” Mr. Adams said defensively during a radio interview with 1010 WINS Friday afternoon, as the stunned city was still drying out.

Not even Mara Gay can come up with an excuse to blame Adams for the rainfall, but her extraordinary ability to always find someone to blame for everything that falls short of making her and certain identities’ lives easier must be someone else’s responsibility to “fix.”

To help clear up any confusion, Mr. Adams: No one is blaming you for acts of God. But in a world shaped by climate change and inequality, preparing the city and its residents for increasingly frequent severe storms, disease outbreaks and air quality hazards is most definitely part of the job.

Mr. Adams could have held weather-related news conferences — as mayors have often done — to build awareness among city agencies and New York’s sizable press corps that a significant storm was on the way. He could have addressed the city by television or radio before the storm hit. He could have used his large bully pulpit to direct New Yorkers out of harm’s way.

So a headline in the New York Times that “flooding is coming” would have been better if it said “Mayor Adams warns that flooding is coming”? If you didn’t read it in the funny papers or hear it on the news, would you have been more aware if Adams held a press conference about it?

The point is about neither Adams, rain nor even Mara Gay, but the ever-increasing expectation that everything that goes wrong has a cure and should have been fixed by someone. In this instance, Gay points the finger at Adams and accuses him of having done an inadequate job of  addressing a rainstorm that everyone who cared already knew about. He couldn’t stop the rain. He couldn’t rebuild the subways or storm drains overnight. He couldn’t be on drivers’ shoulders as they plowed into low-lying stretches of road with three feet of water and whispered, “don’t do it.” What exactly is it that Gay would have had him do?

It’s gotten harder to live in New York in the years since the pandemic, and the city’s mayors will have to do better. The housing crisis has metastasized. Severe weather is becoming more frequent and disruptive. The city is in the throes of an opioid epidemic. More than 100,000 migrants with pressing needs have arrived at the city’s doorstep in the last 18 months.

New Yorkers don’t expect the mayor to solve all of those problems on his own. They do need him show up for the big, difficult job he was elected to do.

Show up? Regurgitating empty buzzwords is easy, especially when that’s what the New York Times pays you to do, but what does “show up” mean? The expectation is that government officials, particularly if they’re not the good ones, are expected to do magic and make their problems disappear. Is Gay suggesting that Adams put those 100,000 immigrants on a bus and send them back to Texas?

If not, does she believe that Adams can make 100,000 beds appear by magic? The problem isn’t that she believes that can happen, but that she can spew some insipid and meaningless phrase like “show up” and that’s good enough to shift the blame away from reality and onto Adams’ shoulders.

And while Gay blames Adams for not magically fixing rainfall, immigration and opioid overdoses, what isn’t happening is serious people giving hard thought to real solutions, or at least the least worst response, to very real problems. Why put in the hard work of thinking about unpleasant things when you can point at someone you don’t like and cry “J’accuse”?

How does this change? Can the children who confuse blame with fixing, reality with fantasy, come around to grasp that they are not helping and in fact hurting their putative allies? What will it take to make the “well-intended” realize that no one is to blame for many of life’s problems, and that no amount of vapid finger-pointing is going to make these problems go away?

*Tuesday talk rules apply, within reason.