Your House Is On Fire

Maybe you're mad because American Catholic bishops don't want to give President Biden communion because he supports a woman's right to choose an abortion.  Maybe you're mad at everybody in history who uttered a putatively racist or sexist word.  Perhaps you're hurt because your gender identity isn't honored. 

Maybe you're in your toxic bubble raging with your pals because critical race theory is coming to get you.  Or you're a Proud Boy who is so broke you're cranking out Black Lives Matter t-shirts for a living. Perhaps you're angry because straight actors keep getting cast in gay roles.  Or because you have to bake a cake for a gay marriage reception. Maybe you're mulling over being the victim of a microaggression.  Perhaps you're pissed because your cruise ship won't recognize your right to refuse vaccination.  

Maybe you're worried about the Israeli government, or the Middle East situation, or a lot of things that do directly affect your life: there are lots of things, real and unreal, to worry about, be angry over, and sink your time and attention into.

Then your house catches fire.  And now all those worries and concerns and obsessions disappear.  Something requires your attention, no matter your opinion on anything at all.

Guess what?  Your house is on fire.  The Earth is on fire. Right now there a thousand year drought underway in the American West.  This moment there is a heat dome sealing in horrid temperatures in large areas of the US.  And it's June.  And to scientists and others who have been paying attention, none of this is surprising. In today's news: the planet is trapping twice the heat it did just 15 years ago.  And something like that is in every day's news.  You know it.  But you go on acting like you don't know.

There is nothing more important about  the Biden infrastructure proposal than the climate related provisions, and yet these are almost never discussed.  Just the politics, as if this were all a game in a nice air-conditioned building, on another planet.

What will it take?  Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, The Ministry of the Future, suggests that it might well take the deaths of millions of human beings in a single event.  There is something called the wet bulb temperature, a combination of heat and humidity, which is lethal.  And I mean lethal, deadly, completely.  Several places on the planet have already reached it briefly, including the city of Chicago.  But when it happens for days at a time, it will kill virtually everyone.  So depending on where it happens, that could be thousands or it could be millions. 

In that novel it happens in India, and that country wakes up: its house is on fire.  (By the end of the book, other countries have awakened, but not the US government.  And they call it science fiction.)

But would even such a wet bulb event like that do it in this world?  Millions of people, so far mostly poor and far away, have already lost their homes to climate disruption, directly or indirectly through resulting warfare.  In other words, the servants quarters have had some fires.  How important is that?

Your house is on fire.  Maybe it hasn't reached your barcalounger, your kitchen table, your gun cabinet, your iphone recharger.  But it's more than stray sparks now.  It's in the wiring. It's in the walls. So what are you going to do about it?