The Hottest Days Of Summer For The West
John Ink2Quill July 2023 Editorial
www.ink2quill.com

These are the hottest days of Summer in The US, on the East Coast, in the city of New York. The heat has settled over our city like an unwanted wool blanket on a warm night. In this humidity places seem farther away and shimmer in the distance and simple tasks just seem to take too much effort to accomplish. The clothes on our backs are a useless inconvenience and our afros become sponges that collect our sweat. This is not the hottest place in the world either. The city sways back and forth in the heat and the road shimmers translucent flames. Some days are too hot to go outside and I often wonder how people from the days before air conditioning managed their lives. After all, when the temperature gets too high we must all flee from it no matter how hearty we imagine ourselves to be. The rats on the streets know this and so are nowhere to be found. Thank our lucky stars that we have our buildings and houses to seek refuge in. They are another example of human ingenuity at work.

I saw a video the other day of the ten cities that face massive flooding over the next few decades. As a matter of fact, the flooding in these cities is expected to be so bad it might force their evacuation. Some of those cities are Miami, Florida and New Orleans, Louisiana in the U.S., Alexandria, Egypt, Bangkok, Thailand, and Jakarta, Indonesia which seems to be in the worst shape for flooding. I’ve visited some of these places and I have to say that they are truly beautiful places with beautiful people. But how will the governments of these places resist Mother Nature? A few years ago New York City had massive flooding. I heard it said that water reached from Battery Park all the way to 14th Street in Manhattan. That was unheard of before it happened. New Yorkers sooner feared a nuclear strike than massive flooding.

Walls and floodgates seem so temporary a solution to me because water is that much of a powerful force. It wears away mountains, rusts the hardest metals, mildews the nicest floors and crushes anything that gets in its way as a tidal wave. Many homebuilders I’ve talked to say that water is the most damaging thing to a house. They say it causes more damaging the insects, rodents, fire even because the costs you incur as a home owner from water damage are so much more.

People say that hot days are here to stay for a while. They say that these temperatures are not going away any time soon and so we must learn to put up with it and plane our lives accordingly. Here in the U.S. we have been plagued by droughts and forest fires these past few decades that only seem to get worse. Some blame it on the Sun and its cycles of electro-magneto activity. Others even blame it on the parts of space that our entire Solar System is swimming through. They describe our Solar System like a giant egg floating through space and that now we are in the process of floating through a more energetic part of space, hence the wakey weather.

I do believe that part of this problem at least is ours to assign the blame to and fix. The way we manage our environment and treat life has to change. I do believe that some of the droughts we experience come from water being pulled out of aquafers and lakes for human use. Some people have suggested that we need to take into account the impact our consumption has on our environment. They even say that it should be regulated and studied more. I’ve heard friends talk about A.I. algorithms that could monitor water use and its effects on the environment. Could that be a partial solution?

Only time will tell because time is running out for us. We are so used to taking everything we have for granted thanks to our cultural conditioning of constant consumption. That seems like the biggest obstacle to us to implement a solution. Either way time is running out for us.

Written by John Ink2Quill

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