wizdUUm.net

I've decided that one word that I no longer have any use for is "pretentious." I used to think I knew what it meant. The dictionary says it's someone pretending to be more intelligent and/or cultured than they actually are. But I've heard so many people use the word against others for things that I personally did not find to be pretentious. I realized that the speaker was creating in their minds a whole negative backstory as to the motivation of the person they were judging, that may or may not be true. And that of course made me wonder how often I'd done the same thing to others.

This past Sunday, our congregation had its annual Coming of Age worship service. I've been thinking about this since Sunday, and have hesitated to make a big deal out of it because: 1) there is so much other painful stuff going on right now; and 2) I suspect that this will hurt some people, including people I care about. But I'm going to talk about it anyway, because things keep calling me back to it.

San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area experienced an historic heatwave this weekend, with recorded temperatures in the city exceeding 100 degrees two days in a row. To give you some context, up until this week there had only been ten 100 degree or more days since 1904. That's only ten 100 degree or more days in 113 years. Because San Francisco so rarely gets hot, most houses do not have air conditioning. In the surrounding areas, temps average 10-20 degrees higher so some homes do have AC while others do not.

The thing is, air conditioning requires power. And so long as our energy comes from fossil fuels, running the AC burns more fossil fuels, which increases global warming, which results in hotter temperatures, which causes more people and businesses to run air-conditioners, which use more fossil fuels, which will make the temps even hotter....