Leftists Finally Admit, They Want You to Give Up Air Conditioning

A recent op-ed in far left Time Magazine suggests that it's time for America - and the world - to get rid of air conditioning in our homes. The opinion piece, penned by Eric Dean Wilson, says that for a number of reasons, including saving the earth from impending global warming doom, the personal comfort of millions should be put (pun intended) on the back burner.

And not only that, writes Wilson, air conditioning can be racist:

"The use of air-conditioning was as symbolic as it was material. It conveyed class status. Who did and didn’t have air-conditioning often fell starkly along the color line, too, especially in the South. It conquered the weather and, with it, the need to sweat or squirm or lie down in the summer swelter. In that sense, air-conditioning allowed Americans to transcend their physical bodies, that long-sought fantasy of the Puritan settlers: to be in the world but not of it."

The Puritans, of course, as he so not-so-subtly implies, were not only oppressive Caucasians, but religious ones, at that.

Wilson then pulls out his broad brush, painting air conditioning, not as something that has improved and enriched the lives of billions, but as a tool of unfair capitalism:

"Comfort cooling began not as a survival strategy but as a business venture. It still carries all those symbolic meanings, though its currency now works globally, cleaving the world into civilized cooling and barbaric heat. Despite what we assume, as a means of weathering a heat wave, individual air-conditioning is terribly ineffective. It works only for those who can afford it."

And then comes his leftist piece de resistance, if the entire world can't be air conditioned, no one should be.

"The troubled history of air-conditioning suggests...that we focus on public cooling, on public comfort, rather than individual cooling, on individual comfort. Ensuring that the most vulnerable among the planet’s human inhabitants can keep cool through better access to public cooling centers, shade-giving trees, safe green spaces, water infrastructure to cool, and smart design will not only enrich our cities overall, it will lower the temperature for everyone. It’s far more efficient this way."

But even if we could, we can't, because it's going to cause the world to burn up, one 72 degree thermostat at a time:

"...we’ll have to re-orient ourselves to the meaning of air-conditioning. And to comfort. Privatized air-conditioning survived the ozone crisis, but its power to separate—by class, by race, by nation, by ability—has survived, too. Comfort for some comes at the expense of the life on this planet.

It’s time we become more comfortable with discomfort. Our survival may depend on it."

Anybody care to speculate what the temp was in the room when Wilson wrote his condemnation of comfort? 68? 70? 72? Let's put it this way, no one really thinks the rules-for-thee, not-for-me author expended a drop of real sweat over his anti-a/c diatribe.

Via Wilson, the leftists have once again shown what we've known all along. Socialism is for the people, not the socialists.