Heat

It is hot.  Hot and stuffy, the kind of day when you think it’s going to rain and sweet, blessed relief is going to pour down from the sky but it doesn’t.  The kind of day when you start to sweat just by walking a couple of blocks outside, at least if you are fat like me.  The kind of day when you will cross the street just to walk in the shade.  “Hotter than the inside of a baker’s oven on a July night in New Orleans” was the line, I believe it was from one of Kerouac’s books, but that line has always stuck in my head as an example of great writing because you read it and you think “Damn, that is hot.”
Of course, this is Prague, moderate, calm, unextreme Prague, with lots of trees and a river meandering through it.  We say “Dang, it’s hot.  Maybe let’s go swimming this weekend.”

There are a lot of places that are hotter.  There’s a rather largish section of India where the temperatures have reached dangerous, like fatally dangerous levels.  People have died.
Imagine that.  You’re just sitting there in your darkened home, trying to keep cool, and you die because the air around you is so hot it sets fire to your lungs when you breathe it in.  Maybe that’s not literally what happens, but the result is the same.  Just by being in that place, your life is endangered.  You could be baked alive.
That is not normal.  That is not O.K.  And we need to do something about it.