Op-Ed: Karma and the Big Heat — Incoming US heatwave is super-dangerous

Americans are watching as a powerful heatwave has stretches from California to Texas. — © Gyeongbuk Fire Service Headquarters/AFP Handout

The predicted early heatwave for the US this summer looks positively grim. If you consider the numbers of people displaced, homeless, evicted, and in generally bad shape, it looks truly karmic.

It will affect millions of people already in horrific situations negatively. Forget the apocalypse, this is incoming right now.

Authorities are trying to prepare, but it’s not easy. It may well be impossible. How many people are “visible” in Nomadic America these days? How do you provide for people you can’t find, or don’t want to be found? What about the ultra-poor and their compulsory impoverished kids, who were in a very bad way already?

This year’s heatwave is a truly social thing, not just “the weather”. Heatwaves are global killers. They put a tremendous strain on resources. They impact the poorest the hardest. There’s nothing good about heatwaves and their collateral damage. With them come wildfires, suffocating dust, and more.

…Not that you’d ever notice.

There’s another big karmic element at work, and it’s a mentality. The heartland of global climate change denial is in the firing line. It doesn’t learn fast, if at all. The world’s richest, most advanced country is at constant risk from itself.

This risk is based on people who apparently didn’t do well in high school-level science. They apparently also didn’t do too well in basic communications, either. There’s no heatwave in your office? Then there can’t be a problem. The theory about this mentality is that the further removed from physical nature you are, the stupider you become. That particular theory’s holding up well.

Simultaneously, and while in full denial, everyone else is doing disaster prepping with good reason. America doesn’t need to be told what disasters can do. The history of heatwaves is unambiguous and undeniable. Every piece of hard climate information monotonously tells the same story worldwide.

This is where the karma kicks in. Karma is the result of one’s own actions…or inactions. If you make decades of dumb calls on all subjects from poverty to just looking out the window, what’s likely to happen? If the house is burning down and you just say that it isn’t, what happens?

Never mind the politics or highly paid hysteria. A tornado doesn’t care. Nor do big, long, murderous heatwaves. You can die of thirst with or without a sycophantic press release.

The sheer scale of these events is the big unavoidable problem. People are still picking up the pieces from disasters ten or twenty years ago. You don’t get hit by these huge things and just dust yourself off and go back to the prom.

You’ll also be astonished to learn that things ain’t all that squeaky peachy dandy right now, with or without a heatwave. If you check out the FEMA home page, you’ll see two things. One is preparation for summer. The other is the list of current major disaster declarations.

I don’t know how much clearer this picture could be. Even someone with a one-word vocabulary consisting of the word “I” could take a pretty accurate guess.

Let’s try including another word, like say maybe the word “urgent”.  This word may be familiar to antiquarians. That’s anyone who remembers anything before 2016 when the world suddenly became so intelligent and incompetent at the same time.

Urgent means “immediate attention required”, among other things. It’s a prioritization.

Research indicates that if you use this word for decades to global media and other skank-based pseudo life forms, it means nothing at all. Too little has been done for too long. This may well be the first instalment of the payoff.

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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.