Happy August 15th (and a little rant from UB)
Happy Aug 15th, everybody! Here, in Florence, the worst seems to be over and the forecasts tell of rain today and tomorrow. This July has been the hottest ever recorded in Italy, but we suffered, on the whole, only limited damage. We had more than a month of brutal heat, but also some rain that eased the problem of the forest fires. Now, we can hope to arrive toSeptember without big troubles, at least in terms of sheer heat.
It is sure, anyway, that this Summer we got a taste of what the “new normal” is going to be. Apart from the horrible heat, we saw a number of spectacular disasters created by bad weather. I can tell you that I had never seen the roof of a house blown away by the wind. I had seen something like that only on TV, and mainly in the US, where the wooden homes always have that look as if they were coming from the tale of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf. But seeing the roofs of concrete buildings in Florence being ripped off and deposited in the courtyards, below, well, it has been a shock.
So much the shock caused by these events, that on TV someone mentioned the term “climate change”. Fortunately, they immediately found an “expert” who appeared on screen and said that everything was fine and that it had been just a normal summer thunderstorm.
Apart from the shy, and immediately removed, intrusion of the real world on the TV screen, Italy continues to operate in conditions that I would call “political Alzheimer.” That is,conditions in which the patient continues to repeat the same things over and over, without reacting to external stimuli. So, we vaguely remember that, in the past, there was a good time in which the economy was growing and there follows that there is nothing else and nothing more than pursuing growth to fix all the problems.
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