If you can’t stand the heat, who locked you in the kitchen?

They know that you’re hot, they know how you sweat //
But they’ll begrudge you a fan if it costs them a cent

If you can’t stand the heat — who locked you in the kitchen?
Did they hold your housing hostage, threaten hunger for your children?
Does it matter that they dined on your sweat and your skill?
Will they even acknowledge hours, days, years that you will
Heat all you must heat and then chill what must chill?
They know that you’re hot, they know how you sweat
But they’ll begrudge you a fan if it costs them a cent.
If you cook them their supper, struggle for their scraps
Comes a day when you’ll cool in a morgue when you lapse.

If you’re locked in the kitchen, and the heat grows too much
Let us know, let us help, let’s unlock that hutch.

• Tom Tordillo

Source: NASA. Folks working at plants would ave jobs if the plants scrubbed smokestacks. Owners object because they’re expensive, and every dime saved could let them fly to the Arctic/Antarctic/Mars if it gets too hot. When they do, they’ll still leave the chefs behind, struggling to churn out meals from the kitchen.

Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner ask the wrong rhetorical question in their substack missive:

There is the old saying, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” But what if we’re all trapped in the kitchen, and there is no one who can stand the heat.

- Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner, “If You Can’t Stand the Heat: The World Sizzles”

They know full well that we’re not ALL trapped in the kitchen.

I am lucky. I have the privilege of living with air conditioning. I’m not working the fields or paving a road. But I know those jobs, and others like them. And I am thinking of all those who have to do them. There are millions who can’t afford to cool their house.

There are millions who can’t afford to cool their house — and may roast. There are millions more who can BARELY afford to cool their house.

Some people actually profit from others roasting to death. If they earn their fortunes from fossil fuels, they’ll fight any alternative until they ensure that they’ll make even more money.

And the rest of us will be left looking at those hot kitchens, blaming the victims, focusing on people trying their best to do a tough job, while the folks who profited off the pain allocate their profits to hire new politicians, like the following folks facing reelection in 2022:

Richard Shelby, Alabama
Lisa Murkowski, Alaska
John Boozman, Arkansas
Marco Rubio, Florida
Mike Crapo, Idaho
Todd Young, Indiana
Chuck Grassley, Iowa
Jerry Moran, Kansas
Rand Paul, Kentucky
John Kennedy, Louisiana
John Hoeven, North Dakota
James Lankford, Oklahoma
Tim Scott, South Carolina
John Thune, South Dakota
Ron Johnson, Wisconsin

Every single one of these politicians works for people who have been ‘turning up the heat’ while the rest of the world burns.

Most of them will be easily reelected in 2022. The very people struggling to pay for heating and air conditioning will reward the folks who profit from making their lives harder, because they believe someone else doing something else might be worse.

There is a new threat to our global climate for which we must be vigilant: cynicism and defeatism.

Rather & Kirschner

Exactly. Politicians who work for the people who cook other people to death are cynical. The rest of us are stuck in the heat. Which may make us confused, but we must not let ourselves be defeated.