Around Christmas, you’ll probably hear some folks say, “the Christmas season hasn’t started until I’ve heard, ‘This Christmas’ (only the Donnie Hathaway version) or ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’, by Mariah Carey.
Yesterday was the start of the summer solstice, but summer officially starts for me when I hear ‘Cruel Summer’ by Bananarama. And it happened this past Saturday when I was driving on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, with the sunroof down, listening to the 80s on 8 channel on Sirius XM. I was instantly transported to my childhood summers.
When I was a kid, my parents room was the only one with an air conditioner. On what counted for an unbearably hot day in the late 1900’s, my mom used to turn on the unit and close the door to keep the room frosty. I would make a tent fort out of sheets and couch cushions and bring along my bright blue New York Giants sleeping bag (it was on sale at Modell’s), a portable radio to listen to Z-100, 98.7 KISS FM or WBL “kicking” S, and the latest Sweet Valley High paperback. My mom would invariably pop in with a snack – be it sliced mangoes or Grace’s strawberry syrup either mixed in milk or poured over shaved ice. Oooooh, talk about the good old days.
Throughout the years, Cruel Summer has taken on a different connotation for me. It’s come to represent literal cruel summers in the form of a terrible climate event, political shenanigans or protests due to some unjust or unrighteous act.
This week, the focus was on a submersible carrying five people that was headed towards the wreckage of the Titanic. There used to be a time, if people would be ghoulish they’d throw a “too soon”? after whatever they said, acknowledging that they knew what they’d said was f*cked up – that time has come and long gone. No sooner than the news became widespread of the submersible’s disappearance, than a race was on to see who could get off the most heinous posts.
And that’s part of the reason, for the past six months, I’ve cut my social media usage way back. The blatant and constant lack of humanity, is overwhelming. When and if there’s been something suspect that I’ve laughed at, it always makes me question myself because that’s not the person I think I am, nor the person I want to be.
But expressing disdain at gallows humor often gets met indignantly or “this is how we deal with tragedy”, which, could be true for some people. But for many others I’m guessing are only trying to make their punchline or meme go viral. Funny how nobody just ever cops to posting these “jokes” just because they’re an a**hole.
Yes, people die every day that don’t get nearly as much coverage, which is a problem. Just yesterday a migrant boat off the coast of Spain’s Canary Islands capsized and last week off a Greek coast, over 700 migrants from Syria, Egypt and Pakistan died in a shipwreck. The latter tragedy is being used in a dark bout of whataboutism, which, if you’re a person who has always cared about humanitarian crises around the world is much different than… if you’re only using it to explain why making fun of those men dying is okay.
It’s a cruel, cruel, summer.
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