Dear People, of the Future:
07/27/2022
I am writing this around 10pm, on Wednesday, July 27th, 2022.
I think I’ve mentioned that I live in St. Louis, MO. If not, I live in St. Louis, MO.
This week, we had historic rainfalls and massive amounts of flooding.
On Monday night into Tuesday morning, we got about 9” of rain (23 centimeters if you’ve finally abandoned the imperial measurements in the future), that’s about what we’d get in two months! In six hours, we broke the previous 24 hour record for most rainfall (from 1915).
I was very lucky. My small house is on a hill, and I had no flooding. Considering half my house is a finished basement and I’ve been living downstairs for the past month because it’s too hot upstairs, I would have been absolutely ruined if it flooded downstairs.
I have several friends who were not as lucky. Lots of people dealing with the stress of their house flooding or their car ruined. One friend lost her basement art studio and every painting she’s done in the last 20 years!
What’s scary about this is how much this is just going to be part of life going forward. The 1915 storm was the remnants of a hurricane that hit the Gulf of Mexico that year. This was just the weather.
We know that Global Warming is making all extreme weather worse, from summer heat waves to winter blizzards to hurricanes and freak extreme storms.
And yet, this year’s US budget allocates two billion dollars to fighting the climate crisis, and seven hundred and fifty billion dollars to the US military.
I really hope you are reading this from a future where your ancestors got their shit together and fought to prevent the worst futures, but if current trends are anything to go by, I suspect you are reading this from a future where everything is fucked.
I wish I felt like there was any kind of collective action I could partake in to help this, but I really do not. It is, eternally, so hard to tell the difference between “I feel that everything is doomed because of Depression” and “I feel that everything is doomed because of observable facts”.
I guess we’ll fucking see.
People of the near future: hey maybe let’s try to fix things before it’s too late? It seems like a good idea to me.
People of the distant future: I am sorry we fucked everything up so much. If you have rich people, I suggest eating them. That will help.
Next Time: I might tell you the story about sparkly naked people, but there might be some kind of bad news first.
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