Nine: Heat Wave (07-20-2022)
Right now, Europe's seeing its most intense period of heat since the Earth was a spinning ball of magma too close to the sun to solidify. Thousands of poor Europeans are dying, with no available dental records to identify them. Worst of all: British people have something new to complain about. Fortunately, this heat has made its way to the American Northeast, where temperatures over then next few days are projected to exceed 100 degrees. The good in this is that it makes Europeans less special, and finally brings some summer heat to the real parts of the United States, Texas has been breaking temperature records for months, but they deserve it.
Before getting too excited about the coming warnings about hydration, energy conservation, and need for protection for the "most vulnerable", remember that the biggest sufferers in any heat wave are the poor saps who have to clock in to work in an air conditioned building, and see less than an hour or two of natural daylight a day. The office worker sacrifices his unique opportunity to complain to toil away with the paperwork and spreadsheets that keep the world running, while lazy construction workers, bike couriers, deliverymen, and other service employees use the heat as an excuse to laze about. While traffic flaggers might need to guzzle water bottles to maintain an upright position, the office worker's daily struggle of guzzling water cooler cups to induce urination and waste time continues as usual.
If you are an office worker, dreading the next week of hearing about how bad it is outside, while you must suffer with coworkers setting the thermostat too low, here's some simple advice- wear some long johns, pop a jocket on with some Hothands in the pockets, and keep some hot coffee close. Driving your internal temperature up, unlike the fortunate few who work outside, is a constant effort. Breaking a sweat in a Herman Miller is no easy task, but succeeding will allow you to gripe and moan like anyone else, and maybe even incorporate some leftist class solidarity into your whining.
Another issue of this heat wave will be the inevitable increase in child car heat deaths. Following each report will be a witch-hunt and public decrying of lazy or negligent parents, equating this to abuse. People often forget just how easy it is to load a 90 pound child into a car seat, get some breakfast, and stop at work without ever thinking to swing by the day care. These sort of slip-ups deserve sympathy, and are no more embarrassing than tripping on the stairs or forgetting a toothbrush on vacation. Kids can be replaced, lifetimes of career-building and hard work to advance social and economic standing can't.
After the expected griping about how hot and how unbearable the hot is passes, people will return to big-picture complaining about climate change, and will cite the expected deaths of old people (who require extensive refrigeration), the overweight (built-in heaters), and children (easy to forget about) as deaths in the ever-advancing climate crisis. Now, we all know that it is far too late to stop or reverse climate change, but nevertheless we will be encourage by NGOs and government officials to accept a lower standard of living, and sacrifice modern luxuries as a collective middle-lower class, not to stop climate change, but to create a level of comfort in luxury for the upper echelons of society.
To avoid being fooled into being a serf, boiled alive for the comfort of his masters, just stop caring about climate change. The worst of the crisis won't come in the lifetime of anyone old enough to read this, and the solutions won't work in the lifetime of this piece's digital existence. Pushing for climate crisis won't win anyone brownie points, but it will allow participants to live a happy, comfortable existence until such time as tornado, hurricane, or heat wave brings them to the comfort of the next life.