Write an article about ‘A silent and invisible killer of silent and invisible people’ .Organize the content with appropriate headings and subheadings (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6), Retain any existing tags from <\/p>\n
\u201cExtremely hot \u2014 106, an all time record. Like being hit with a hammer … had idea about pulling literary quotes on the heat … so I spent a pleasant hour in the library.\u201d
\u2014 Journal entry, July 13, 1995<\/p>\n
Normality has a weight, an inertia, almost subject to the laws of physics. \u201cObjects at rest tend to stay at rest.\u201d Habit sits there, slumbering, pelted by events, and doesn\u2019t want to stir, let mercury or flood waters rise.<\/p>\n
Thirty years ago, a murderous heat wave hit Chicago \u2014 739 people died. Had they perished in Daley Plaza it would be remembered as an epic tragedy \u2014 the Great Chicago fire killed less than half as many. There would be a statue.<\/p>\n
But the heat wave victims died alone in scattered rooms, windows sealed, air conditioning broken. They were mostly elderly, though two were toddlers who fell asleep in the back of a day-care van, forgotten for one fatal hour.<\/p>\n
The government was slow to grasp what was happening. The media was slow. I was slow.<\/p>\n
I remember looking up at Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund Donahue doing a press conference on TV and sniffing: \u201cShowboat. He\u2019s calling everybody who dies in Cook County a heat death …\u201d<\/p>\n
In our defense, being slow to recognize problems and then fast to forget them is an American folk illness.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe political lesson of the heat wave was you can deny and ignore and forget the disaster,\u201d said Eric Klinenberg, the New York University sociologist whose 2002 book, \u201cHeat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago\u201d is the seminal text of the disaster.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can say it was an act of God. You can blame the victims for not taking care of themselves, and in American politics, that works. An enduring fact about this enormous Chicago catastrophe is that it just disappeared, almost as it was happening, but certainly after it happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnother wildly hot day … Head off to the NU library where I got some good books. Dinner at the Davis Street Fish House; though I really wasn\u2019t hungry \u2014 a factor of the heat.\u201d
\u2014 July 14, 1995<\/p>\n
The literary quote story ran that day and haunts me still. Coleridge\u2019s \u201csummer has set in with its usual severity.\u201d A bit of light nothing whose underlying message was: It\u2019s summer. It\u2019s hot. Get over it.<\/p>\n
In my 2002 review of \u201cHeat Wave,\u201d I wrote:<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I read over my droll little exercise, I couldn\u2019t help but think of some Sun-Times subscriber, an elderly man in a strap T-shirt, sitting in his sweltering, closed room on the West Side, reading halfway through, folding the paper, then quietly turning his face to the wall and dying.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow is this affecting people other than myself?\u201d is not a very sophisticated question. Not rocket science. Though you can argue our political moment is based on the conviction that huge swathes of the American population simply don\u2019t matter and should be ignored, the parts of the government that aid them lopped away.<\/p>\n
FEMA was about to be disbanded when the Texas floods hit. Those girls who died at Camp Mystic in Texas were sleeping in cabins built by the river in an \u201cextremely hazardous\u201d floodway.<\/p>\n
What the Texas floods had was drama, visuals and the kind of victims the media can get excited about.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s especially chilling about the Texas floods is, all these children who died; the drama of the parents looking for the children,\u201d Klinenberg said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can all relate to the pain of that. The images are terrifying. Make us all feel vulnerable. One key difference in the heat wave, the people who died, they were poor, they were old, they were socially isolated, they were disproportionately Black. They were just not people who we value.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHundreds of people have died in this. I went out to a CHA home to talk to old people. Sad. Greasy catfish lunch at Wallace Davis West Side place.\u201d
\u2014 July 16, 1995<\/p>\n
The heat isn\u2019t the real problem; the social conditions are. Klinenberg called the heat, \u201ca silent and invisible killer of silent and invisible people.\u201d<\/p>\n
The heat exposed what is usually hidden.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor one week, suddenly all the background conditions that are so dangerous and so taken for granted became visible and dramatic and consequential,\u201d he said. \u201cThe city melted down, and all its problems were exposed for the world to see.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMorning chasing Daley. Sent to the parking lot of the Treasure Island on Broadway \u2014 thought I\u2019d miss him but instead found all the media in the world waiting for him. Still quite hot out. Chased Daley to some press conference an hour long, all his brass behind him, trying to get the city off the hook.\u201d
\u2014July 17, 1995<\/p>\n
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