watchyourattitude:

dracofidus:

England, and from what I hear, Europe, is undergoing a heatwave.

Temperatures in the UK are around 30°C. Where I am it’s gonna hit 32°C in the next couple of hours.

To you Americans, you Australians, that’s nothing. It’s a mild day, we’re weak, whatever, I’ve heard it all, the thing is, WE AREN’T EQUIPPED TO DEAL WITH THIS.

The average temperature in the UK in July is 17°C. It is in the 30’s today. We simply are not used to it. We are used to rain and sleet and hail and wind, not heat. And our heat is a damp heat. A humid heat.

Because of all the sea around us we have an extremely humid climate if it gets warm. The air literally feels heavy right now. I am struggling to cool down because the humidity is fucking with my sweat, and as a trans man, the high amounts of water in the air, combined with my binder make it difficult to breathe, and I assume a lot of asthmatic people have a similar problem.

When temperatures in the UK are like this, people die. Don’t laugh about it. It is serious. It may not seem like much to you, it may not seem warm to you, but in a similar heatwave in 2013, 760 people died.

Our infrastructure is not built to cope with this. The house I live in, for instance, was built when the Thames still used to freeze over. It was built to be warm. The walls are thick, the windows are small, some rooms don’t even have windows that open, it was built with no though to air circulation, and this is one of the most common types of home in the UK. The UK government subsidises insulation. People fill every gap in their home with stuff that will keep the heat in. And nobody – literally nobody – has aircon. A lot of businesses don’t even have it. We have no use for it 99.9% of the time. Hell, I don’t even own a desk fan or even a hand held fan.

It is very different here to where you are. And we are used to and equipped for very different things. Instead of laughing, teach us how to stay cool. Instead of making jokes or quips, make info posts, and things that will help us.

Remember, this may be an average day to you, but to us it’s a heatwave. We cannot cope. And for some, particularly children and the elderly, it’s literally a matter of life and death.

Repeating this cause there’s another heatwave going on in Europe at the moment. This is reality for us.

Okay, I can’t take it anymore.

“It’s different here”

No it’s not. Hundreds of people die every. single. year. over here due to the heat. Most of them are poor. Many of them are elderly. A lot are children. 

Assuming everyone here has A/C is honestly the most disgustingly middle class thing I have ever seen. I live in Texas and I have not had air conditioning in 4 years. It’s not even summer and our temperatures are already up in the high 90s F. 

Why am I pissed about this? Because Tumblr seems to think that it’s perfectly okay to openly mock people for hating winter and the cold. The same people making posts like this are the ones reblogging posts mocking cities in warm climates for shutting down when we get ice. Not snow. ICE. Like the entire city turns into an ice rink and we’re supposed to have to deal with that for some reason. And guess what. That kills people. Forcing people who are inexperienced to drive in that is dangerous. We don’t have the infrastructure to deal with it. It’s not cost effective. And a few years ago, we had record snowfall that shut the entire city down. And we were mocked for not being able to handle it. 

I’ve seen posts openly derisive about people with SAD because “I’m depressed all the time” like people with SAD…aren’t? Yeah, no. I have SAD, and I have depression all year round, it’s just intensely worse in the fall and winter. 

I’ve seen posts say “If you hate fall, what’s wrong with you?” 

Why is that okay, but doing the same thing during summer is not? Seriously. I want an answer.

I haven’t had heat in 4 years either. During those record snowfalls. Yeah, no heat. My apartment was 40F. I have anemia and crappy circulation. My toes turned blue. And yet people who make posts like this one somehow feel it’s okay to mock me and say shit like “When you’re cold, you can just put on a sweater” as though cold doesn’t settle on your bones and stay there. A hoodie isn’t going to do anything when you don’t have enough red blood cells to heat you’re entire body and you’re too poor to do anything about it. It’s not going to make my joints stop hurting, and it’s not going to keep me from getting sick for 3 months. 

My point is, I see these posts every single year yet not one against people doing the same thing to people who can’t handle the cold. (For the record, I have never, in over 5 years on this site ever seen a post mocking people for not being able to handle the heat.) It’s a level of hypocrisy that just frustrates me every time I see it. 

And yes, I’m going to say it. When it comes to the heat, the poor have it worse here than they do over there. Because it gets in the 100s F (40sC) and they have nowhere to go. I finally complained about my AC not working (I couldn’t afford to run it and frankly I can’t now.) It’s taken nearly 2 weeks for them to do anything about it. And I’m lucky. If I were elderly or sick, I’d be dead by now. If I were in an even cheaper place, I might have a landlord who didn’t care. If I were homeless, I could be denied access to places with air conditioning because “loitering” is against the law in a lot of places. I work in a very large city and I see people panhandling on street corners every day. One of them was pregnant. 

Seriously, it really really bugs me that this post makes the assumption that people don’t die here from the heat by the 100s. But ya know, I get it. They’re poor, homeless, elderly. So who gives a shit right? </sarcasm> If we can’t work up a lot of worry over people dying over there, it’s because we’re too worried about the people dying over here in objectively worse conditions. Our summers are longer and more intense. It gets so humid here, the air is thick with it. People have to work in that. Texas alone has a wicked construction fetish. I always want to give those guys water. Cops (at least used to) work in wool uniforms in the dead of summer.

But okay, you want advice. I can give it to you. I’d be happy to. I was gonna post it after this, but fuck it. I’m making a separate post.

Tl;dr: if you guys are going to make posts like this, tumble needs to stop being shitheels to people who hate the cold.