How it Feels to Inhale Muck: Struggling to breathe in Chicago 6.29.23
The air has been a sickening color since Monday. I’ve tried to stay inside because my face, head, and lungs ache and it’s hard to breathe.
I wore a mask the few times I needed to leave our building. It felt weird to remove the mask when I went inside the grocery store, the physical therapy office, the senior home where my mother-in-law lives.
The bad air has found its way into my lungs, and I feel as though I’ve inhaled layers of filth. I wake up gasping and grab my emergency inhaler. If that doesn’t open the airways enough to give me relief, I have a nebulizer, which works more slowly and gets deeper into my lungs.
In one longtime nightmare (#1), I’m struggling to breathe. That’s every night this week. In another longtime nightmare (#2), one of my kids is trying to drive through a flooded street, or I’m driving and they’re young, sitting in the back. I wake up in a panic when water starts coming in through the windows.
Today, the water is four or five feet deep on the corner near my daughter’s house in Denver. It’s not passable in a normal car. Now I feel sick to my stomach. Denver’s unusual, record-breaking rains typify the extremes of weather that have been occurring across the globe:
“As of 5 p.m. on June 30, Denver International Airport had recorded 6.10 inches of total rainfall this month. This is well above the 1.94 inches of rain that Denver usually picks up for the month and has been enough to secure June 2023 as the wettest June in recorded history.” FOX news channel KDVR.
Want to know more? EARTH JUSTICE (a non-profit whose motto is “Because the Earth needs a good Lawyer), has THIS to say about “How Climate Change is Fueling Extreme Weather.”
We can all be more careful about our water usage, limit driving gasoline powered cars, and even be abstemious about using air conditioning, but none of that will be as effective as voting for educated, intelligent representatives and senators who follow real science. Saying that “there’s no such thing as climate change because look how beautiful it is today,” or “Humans have nothing to do with the climate,” are opinions, not science.
Based on years of calculations and studies, the climate is warming. All over the world.
Who were the people that pooh-poohed the science all these years? You know who they are, right? You guessed, didn’t you, that it’s all about money?
We’re living through dark(ish) days, literally and figuratively. The sky is ashen with a yellow tint (although it’s better than it was a few days ago). How much worse is it farther north, where fires have been burning across Canada? My heart breaks for our northern neighbors. Most of these fires have been triggered by lightning, assisted by extremely dry conditions exacerbated by climate change. Global warming. Triggered or assisted by humans.
The nearly 3,000 fires in Canada so far this year were not caused by arsonists or “space lasers.” We thought the U.S. had a monopoly on crazies, but apparently there are those across the border who believe that a beep-boop-bop magical ability to affect nature is concentrated in the hands of a few. And those few turn out to be (surprise surprise) my people (the Jews).
There are people all over the world who follow the rantings of television personalities, false prophets, and egomaniac wannabe-Putinesque leaders. They don’t pay attention to or accept scientific studies based on years of carefully calculated statistics, formulated by researchers and well-educated specialists who have dedicated their lives to studying (and hopefully saving) the planet. Instead, these people listen to ill-informed cuckoo-nutcases of one kind or another, who collectively share a disregard for facts.
Do those who think little of science believe that this NON-Climate-Change/NON-Global Warming will pass over their homes like the Angel of Death passed over the homes of Jews in the biblical story of the Exodus from Egypt? Was that perhaps the original use for the space lasers? Hmmm.
P.S. I didn’t feel well enough to finish and post this story until now, three days later. Today it’s pouring and gray and I hope it’s raining across Canada because they needed it. I’m not confusing weather with climate though, unlike @realDonaldTrump, who tweeted this at 2:43pm on Nov 1, 2011: “It snowed over 4 inches this past weekend in New York City. It is still October. So much for Global Warming.”
