I Ain't Goin' Nowhere

The recent weather in Europe resembles the recent weather in the American Southwest - it's hot as hell.  This is the most devastating heat wave in the Old Country since last year.

The pandemic may be over, but my decision not to make any plans, dating back to the end of March of last year (2022), is still in force.  Circumstances having nothing to do with the pandemic have pretty much kept me home for the most part.   I had once thought I could go to Europe this year, 2023, figuring that the pandemic would end by then; as fate would have it, there's too much else going on to allow me to go anywhere - not the least of which is climate change, which is ravaging the planet so quickly that it's not worth making plans to travel even for a day.

I chose to travel abroad this year because I figured I couldn't wait any longer.  If I wasn't going anywhere this year I concluded I'd never go.  And thanks to climate change, I'm not going this year or likely any other year.  Several people I know have been lucky to travel abroad already, of course.  I know plenty of people who have already been to Paris for example, and some of them have already been to Paris as many times as I've been to Newark.  Why, looking at the Facebook timeline of a former college classmate, I found pictures of Paris that my classmate took while on vacation there last July.

I even have one of them right here to show you! (I love how I can download just about anything on social media!)

And my former college classmate and I aren't even Facebook friends! 

Forget about going out of the country; with rare exceptions, I can't even go out of my state.  I was hoping to meet a woman in Connecticut I'm friends with through social media; we've never met in person.  But, because things are dicey here at home, I can't make any plans.  It's just as well; if I had made plans to see her this past Sunday, July 16, I would have had to cancel them - seems there was a tornado watch covering the entire state of Connecticut, and flooding closed a lot of rads in the state.  See what I mean about climate change ruining travel?

Well, I won't be going to Paris any time soon.  The nature of my employment - which I won't get into, because it's private information aht 's no business of yours - only allows me to travel in July and August, so I can't go to any European capital when it's less likely to be scorching hot.  As for Paris, next year is the Olympics, so even next summer isn't bad meteorologically, I have to rule that out.  And the summer of 2025?  Even if that summer isn't too hot, I likely won't be able to leave the United States then anyway.  No one will.  See, Trump is likely to be in the White House again, and of course a dictator doesn't allow his subjects to leave the country because it looks bad for him.

Do not assume that a second Trump administration will not forbid anyone from leaving the country.  After all, Republican legislators in various states are already figuring out ways to keep pregnant women from traveling out of state to get abortions.

And by 2025, climate change will have wrecked the earth so badly that no one will want to go anywhere anyway.  In some cases, they may have to go somewhere because their homeland is no longer habitable.