This Summer is Hot

I’ve been thinking a lot about what summertime means.

Maybe it’s the famous Mariame Kaba essay entitled “Summer Heat” that spurred the ongoing reflections that I have whenever this part of the year arrives, but I feel every year as though I don’t know what I am supposed to make of this time. Sure, college students may be working summer jobs, doing research possibly, taking an internship, or just resting. Sometimes it is an amalgamation of these activities. But even then, I ask myself, what is this time of year supposed to be?

I’m thinking about climate catastrophes that are already here, which have killed people from recent heatwaves, or people who have been trapped because of flooding in the midwest. We are still living through an ongoing pandemic, where the state has made it clear they do not care about the lives of its citizens enough to equitably distribute vaccines and lift mask mandates amidst variants running rampant. The summertime is supposed to be a time of exploration, of breaking the ongoing monotony of our lives, to come to a family cookout, to run into people you haven’t seen in years, and to just be present every day.

But is that expectation even feasible? COVID, rising temperatures, the inevitability of forest fires, the constant and continued exploitation of colonized peoples from the hands of the US empire, the Crime Bill president ramping…