By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
It was 108 in St. Louis on Thursday. It was projected to be 106 in Nashville on Friday. The forecasters thought it pertinent to mention that neither of those cities are located in the deserts of Nevada or Arizona, subject to extreme heat, and that both of them were suffering under hotter skies than even Florida.
It turns out that this has been the warmest spring on the books, breaking some 18,000 recorded highs, and summer is setting out to do the same. This is the kind of thing that makes us anxious; it’s hard on young and old alike, especially in an economy that leaves millions struggling to put food on the table, let alone affording to turn on the air. Last year was record-breaking in Europe; this year, we’re already ahead of the competition.
Heat in the Midwest is vastly different from that of either coast, where climate has its own rules. The random very hot or very cold season aside, we abide as best we can, mid-country. There’s seldom any change to the time-proven ways of dealing with seasons. We don’t even irrigate crops around here, depending on rain to fill ponds to pull from in emergencies, or to water critters in a drought. We’ve had years of warning that the weather was getting more extreme, that we would eventually see the results of ignoring climate change, but — damn it! — we’re still not ready.
Is anybody ever really ready for change? Can’t we just wish it away? Pretend it isn’t there? Well, the answer is, yes, we can, and at least half of the nation has become quite artful at doing so.
I heard earlier this week, for instance, that since everyone knew the Supremes were going to find Obama’s Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, robbing him of his signature legislation and proving him a weak and ineffectual president, Romney’s personal cachet was growing among the undecided. Indeed, without the dreaded tyranny of Obamacare to weigh down the aspirations of the right, the freely-spent assets of the anti-Obama Billionaires’ Club and ongoing efforts at voter suppression were all that was needed to deliver a new Republican era.