Air conditioning is a great equalizer. The recent July heatwave on the east coast proved it again. More to the point: the American Southwest would not be what it is today without it.
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As great as the “air” is in many ways it has softened us. It turned a nation that once endured the summer’s heat and discomfort into a people who panic when the thermostat creeps above 75.
We scurry from our air-conditioned homes to our air-conditioned cars to our air-conditioned workplaces horrified to break a sweat. We have become a nation that flees from the slightest inconvenience retreating behind sealed windows and humming HVAC units convinced that comfort is a constitutional right.
My cousin proved the exception over the recent Independence Day weekend. She endured in a four-story Brooklyn pre-World War II walk-up. In other words, no elevator and no air conditioning as the mercury reached triple digits. She is a septuagenarian who still works as a visiting nurse who can still endure a summer heat wave in a building that predates air conditioning itself.
She didn’t complain. She didn’t melt. She didn’t demand a government program. She simply persevered the way Americans once did without question.
Contrast that with the rest of us. We treat heat like an existential threat. We have forgotten that sweat is natural and how discomfort builds resilience and that the human body was designed to handle more than 75 degrees and filtered air.
Windows stayed open unless it rained. Kids cooled off by running through fire hydrants and sprinklers. Waistlines were leaner and people healthier.
Before air, the heat drove us outside and brought us together.
Today?
Most neighborhoods are sealed shut as we traded human connection for climate control.
Congress once fled Washington every summer because the heat was unbearable. Legislators scattered and the nation benefited from the break. However, once the Capitol installed air in 1929, lawmakers stayed. As the late Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi once quipped, “We put in air conditioning, stayed year-round, and ruined America.”
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With comfort came more laws, more bureaucracy, and more government.
Air also reshaped architecture. Homes built a century ago had high ceilings, cross ventilation and wide hallways that moved air naturally. Today’s houses assume you will never open a window. Commercial buildings used to have windows that opened; now they are sealed glass boxes that make us oblivious to the seasons.
We have engineered nature out of daily life and toughness out of ourselves.
By no means is air unnecessary as it saves lives protecting the elderly and those with respiratory issues. It makes modern life possible in places like Las Vegas, Phoenix and Miami.
But it also seduces us. And very hard at that.
It convinces us that discomfort is intolerable, sweating is a crisis and that the outdoors is something to be avoided unless the weather is perfect.
We have become a nation that complains about humidity the way previous generations complained about walking uphill both ways.
The rest of the world still treats air as a luxury. In India, people “sit in AC” as if it is an event not to be missed. In Europe, they pretend they do not need it even as they hide under misting systems and shade curtains.
Air conditioning isn’t the problem. Our dependence on it is. We have built a culture that worships comfort and fears hardship. We have forgotten that resilience is forged in sweat, not in climate-controlled rooms.
My cousin in New York didn’t panic. She lived through the heat the way millions once did with grit, patience, and acceptance that discomfort is part of life.
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I wasn’t surprised.
After all, she’s a Maresca.
Image: Pixabay.