"it sez in the yew-nighted
states constitution: thou shalt not wear a mask. yeah, it’s too bad about grandma. but . . . well, the lord giveth . . ." this whole covid thing reminds me of the fragility of everything hannah arendt sez totalitarian regimes don’t just think “everything is permitted” -- they think everything is possible so why not open everything up, go without masks & expect to stay healthy, if it is today’s party line? the party decides what reality is, not reality, the party. so why not keep burning “clean coal,” sprawling city footprints, massively tooting methane, & using petrochemicals to make everything? maybe b/c “co2 in earth’s atmosphere nearing levels of 15m yrs ago”? or: “‘rising chance’ world will exceed 1.5˚ c warming limit in 5 yrs”? ("rising chance" -- *snork!*) but first the good news: june 2020 was not the hottest june on record. it was only a tie. with june 2019. n.e. siberia spent june 18 f > normal; if that happened in n.y.c., they’d have highs of 104 & lows of 87 every day of july (but it won't happen here) we won't go into “arctic amplification” or feedback loops & tipping points: we want to keep it on the ground, where most people live, in this verse-chronicle so: let’s talk about canada -- they have people there -- where they define a “tropical night” as a lo of > 68 f: usually toronto has 1 or 2/yr. but they’ve had 6 straight “tropical nights” in toronto "and we're not even in the dog days of summer.” in hyderabad, construction fells trees, kills shade: street vendors have to sit in 110+ f, but potential customers don’t like to stand in it, so . . . “stay cool w/portable a.c.!” the ad sez deluges kill 58 in s. japan; 219 evac’d in central japan; houses & people swept away by rushing water in nepal; buffaloes, in gujarat; “heaviest rain in years” in hubei: 100 perished so far: latest: 9 in landslide (they didn’t publish names, but they had them) the state gov. in nigeria, nattily dressed in sharkskin caftan as he surveys washed- out roads, sez: “i want to assure you that we will repair the damaged roads, expand the gutters and bridges so that when rains fall, the gutters and the bridges would be able to accommodate the large volume of water. w/ this, the problem of erosion would be a thing of the past.” yes, it would. but we don’t do such things here in the u.s. of a., where if it ain’t broke, we sure as hell ain’t gonna fix it. which means it — and we — would be really, really broke, one day -- if we let it get to us. but we don’t let it. we’ll take our rising chances.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |