Taking the heat to the tea party

My family conducts its business the way the U.S. government is supposed to. A recent example involving fiscal policy occurred during last week’s smoldering heat wave. Maybe the folks in Washington could learn from the way we dealt with a recent situation.

In our mini-society, our three children are equivalent to the nation’s citizens. My wife fills the roles of president, Congress, treasury secretary and Federal Reserve Board. My mother-in-law serves as the Supreme Court, though fortunately she’s not an activist jurist. I am the habitually-ranting opposition, our family’s own little tea party. I stomp my feet, threaten and loudly object to every non-essential expenditure, although my actions rarely accomplish anything worthwhile.

But sometimes even the staunchest deficit hawks and the biggest spenders can compromise, cooperate and find common ground. Our family’s ruling parties actually agree when it comes to indoor temperature control of our home in the summer. My spouse and I have each concluded we do not wish to invest in air conditioning, although we arrived at this conclusion through two different methods of reasoning. Ultimately we decided it is a want, not a need.

My wife chooses to eschew air conditioning because she is truly concerned with doing what’s best for our family, and for the majority of the people around us.

I don’t want it because I wish to keep expenses down.

She is a dedicated conservationist who believes in re-using anything that’s reusable, recycling anything that’s not, and responsibly utilizing renewable sources of energy.

I believe in purchasing only necessities, not luxuries.

She is a responsible, forward-thinking citizen concerned about the ongoing effects of global warming, and is determined to do her part to reduce our family’s carbon footprint.

I am a nickel-squeezing cheapskate who objects to paying one penny more than necessary for energy to soulless fat cats who are taking advantage of an addiction, which they and their predecessors knowingly fueled (pun intended), and who are getting wealthier by the second thanks to our nation’s dependence on their products.

Besides, Mainers need air conditioning about as often as Libyans require space heaters. I maintain there are no more than 14 days per calendar year when we could really use it; my wife thinks it’s even fewer than that. But we both agreed that last Thursday and Friday were two of those occasions.

By 9 a.m. Thursday, the temperature inside our house on the main floor was in the mid-80s, with equally dreadful humidity. But that felt crisply autumnal compared to upstairs, where the bedrooms are located.

Maintaining oral hygiene that morning was challenging, since the toothpaste that emerged from the tube did so in a molten form that was more liquid than gel. Which was just as well, since the bathroom’s tap water was more appropriate for bathing than drinking. Our children awoke looking like melted popsicles, but given the looks on their faces when they first saw me, it was apparent I wasn’t going to be posing for any 8×10” glossies that day either.

The upstairs conditions in our house combined the hellish heat of Death Valley with the stifling humidity of the Okefenokee Swamp. The sun beating directly down through the skylight in the bathroom made anyone standing directly under it understand how it would feel being a bug trapped under a magnifying glass held by a sadistic child on a smolderingly hot and sunny day. Fans placed strategically around our abode merely made the torrid air only slightly less stagnant, and trying to sleep that night was an exercise in futility.

By mid-afternoon Friday, the temperature had reached triple digits outside, a fact gleefully reported later that afternoon by all-too-cheerful TV weathermen ensconced in air-conditioned studios. Our children spent the evening with kind relatives whose home was more temperate than ours. But their selfless parents stayed home to move the family’s panting guinea pigs to slightly less sweltering conditions (the basement), deal with a fish whose murky tank water looked like (and was likely as warm as) onion soup, and then unsuccessfully tried to get a good night’s sleep.

Thankfully, the heat and humidity has temporarily eased. But August is statistically hotter than July ”¦

It’s too bad so many spineless members of Congress are more concerned with getting re-elected than they are with the future of their nation and its citizens. We’d be far better served if they’d just use their common sense, like the leader of our house does. When the inevitable next heat wave begins and I suggest the whole family sleep in the car all night with the motor running and the AC on, my conservationist wife will just ignore me, which is what any sensible elected official should do to the tea party and the willfully ignorant blustering of its members and enablers.

Sign In: