I was sitting in my back yard enjoying a tall glass of soft drink with ice, watching my youngest daughter. We were enjoying the cool change that had swept in after the hottest day in recorded history in Melbourne. The temperature reached 46° celsius (114.8° fahrenheit) and has since dropped to 29° celsius (84.2°f). And as I sat there enjoying the cool breeze as the house I am renting is cooling with the exhaust fans and cleverly positioned fans sucking in that cool air, I started to think.
My thoughts wandered to those who were suffering in the bush fires that started today, and the brave men and women fighting them, and to the many elderly and sick folk who have battled to keep cool and survive today and last week’s hottest streak.
It occurred to me that many people live in this kind of heat for most of the year without fans, air conditioners and other forms of cooling that consume electricity and in the case of air conditioners spew out gases that affect the atmosphere. This got me to think about what these folk in most Third World countries in Asia, Africa, and ok, some European countries think about us in our comfy air conditioned and sanitized houses and cars. Then, I thought, with all the financial crisis occurring to the supposed Super Powers of this world, what do these folk think about that?
Not sure if they hear much about the going ons here in Australia, USA, Europe, China etc, but I know that this affects them. Many of these Third World nations relay on trade and the supply of slavery, I mean cheap labour, to supply clothes etc to Western countries. But, most of these folks live daily with unemployment, high costs of food and clothing, something that we in the west are getting into now that our global economies are crashing. It is the world’s poorest, economically and socially, who are bearing the burden of the way we in the west have lived.
Do the folks in these countries laugh at us in our arrogance and fumbling to survive crisis that many of them couldn’t even imagine?
I don’t think so. I believe that this crisis we see daily on the news is much greater than the layoffs of labour that frighten us in their huge numbers (USA and Chine) — it affects so much more than our ability to keep cool and have hot water. It’s life and death.
Heavy thoughts as I sat in the cool breeze, I know. And I also know that many other wise people have pondered the ramifications of the greater depression than I. But for that moment, I wondered what a man nearing 40 with wife and a family of three, living in the slums of India, or the desert of Dakar would think of me and my struggle. This might sound selfish, but it has got me thinking more about my lifestyle.
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