I’m on a tour of Egypt.
I tried to strike up a conversation with a chainsmoker who was trapped on the balcony with me until he finished his two cigarettes.
“So! How do you like the tour so far?!” I chirped. The response I expected was, “Oh it’s amazing.” We’d just come back from the pyramids. Instead, he unleashed a litany of complaints, before concluding that he was finished with Arab countries as vacation spots. OK then.
He did make the point that the extreme, visible poverty was upsetting (to be clear his concern was his enjoyment of the experience, not the plight of the visibly poor). And it’s true. In Cairo, you are more likely to see a donkey than a person in business attire. The little kids stare at us like we’re a rare bird species, so trips abroad are probably not a part of their lives. There’s a little corner of Cairo, under a bridge, where packs of goats, cows, people, stray cats and dogs co-exist. Naturally I find it delightful, but I find it delightful from an air-conditioned bus.
(Incidentally, unlike, say, wealthy Western “Marxist” intellectuals, people’s faces — Egyptian and Bulgarian — light up when I tell them I live in New York. “AMERICA!?!?!?” shrieked an adorable Egyptian kid with with joy when I told him where I live. “Americans are my favorite people!!!” He added. (He should really start reading the Grayzone).
What is it about visible poverty in Egypt in particular? It’s Egypt, not Somalia. But then, LOL. It’s the fucking heat. Rich people don’t go outside unless it’s very early morning or night, so only poor people are visible.
The heat, my God, the heat. I’ll put on by Bulgarian hat and complain now. Whenever our delightful tour guide spent more than 5 minutes talking to us in a non-shady area, I cast curses on him and his family for 10 generations. “I can fucking Google the fucking story of Osiris!!!” I’d silently seethe, a heat headache instantly blooming in my skull despite a hat and the 95 bottles of water I’d consumed. And I’m not a wuss! I do things like go running in the middle of the day during New York summer! I don’t like it, but it’s fine—it makes you feel like you’re going to die, but you don’t actually die. When we were in the city of Aslum, the southernmost part of the country, to look at the glorious tribute to Ramses the II, if I had tried running, I’d actually have died.
But, if you have access to central air, don’t count your blessings just yet! As the rest of the planet continues to heat up, people who can afford it will literally never be able to go outside. No sucking it up for an hour of uncomfortable, but not deadly heat, to see the pyramids and tribute to Ramses II. I honestly think that anyone under 60 will live through the experience of literally never being able to go outdoors.
The canary in the mine of humanity is incarcerated people. That’s because no one gives a fuck about them, except for hippies like me and others I like to call “criminal justice lunatics.” In states where facilities don’t have air-conditioning, people are literally dropping dead from the heat. They report more than 120 degree heat in Texas facilities and state prisons in the South, where lawmakers have decided that they’d rather cook people alive than give them air-conditioning. (Temperatures of, say, 105, are worsened by the fact that prisons are made of concrete. One formerly incarcerated woman I spoke with likened it to “being baked in a concrete oven”).
Look, I have to make a deeply shameful confession. I always cared about climate change, but in the way that people like me are supposed to care about climate change: as a virtue signal particular to my self-identity, class, political affiliation, education levels, etc. etc. etc. But I never thought I’d have skin in the game. Frankly, I thought I’d be dead before we started experiencing the day-to-day horrors of climate change. Now, in fact, my generation of elderly millennials—I’m 41—may get it the worst, because we’ll be old old by the time you can’t go outside, in a world that decided, long ago, that old people are worthless because they’re not productive in Capitalism. I envision a Logan’s Run situation.
Fuck.
Such excellent writing, Tana. Thank you so much. :)
I will be 60 soon. Come retirement, I will be essentially useless.. To the species, to the economy, to the planet . Yeah, the Logan's Run solution has merit.