I have accused some people of making up stuff, most recently the rightwing supermajority of the United States Supreme Court. But I must confess to something. I do a little makebelieving myself. I have to. It’s part of my job. 

I can’t be a member of the American pundit corps without pretending, implicitly, that the truth is out there, waiting for me to reveal it to you. 

But the truth is not waiting for me.

It’s not waiting for anyone. The truth is going to do what the truth is going to do. Meanwhile, it’s right there, in front of you, “hiding” in plain sight. It has always been evident. It has always been close to you. It doesn’t need to be revealed. The lies concealing it, however, do.

Fortunately – anyway, I hope there’s some fortune in it – circumstances are forcing us to see through the biggest lie toward the biggest truth.

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Even if we somehow overcome climate change, this lie would still endure. The idea that we are individuals who are born alone and die alone will endure. The idea that the truth needs to be revealed will endure. And as long as the lie endures, there will be some crisis or another. Climate change just happens to be the biggest one of all.

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What circumstances? Well, you know, it’s hot!

“Heat warnings and advisories were in effect Tuesday for more than 90 million Americans,” according to Wednesday’s USA Today, “as record-breaking temperatures swept the south with little relief in sight.”

By midweek, those 90 million suffering from the heat rose to 100 million, across 15 states, with another 80 million – “nearly a quarter of the population,” noted USA Today – “expected to see air temperatures or the heat index above 105 degrees through the weekend.” 

The heat is taking a toll on cities. They are scrambling to open “cooling stations,” not only for the homeless. Electricity-use is soaring. Authorities are inspecting workplaces for “heat-related illnesses.” Hospitals are stressed. “Some patients were being cooled off in ice-packed body bags,” said USA Today. Some prisons are in trouble. “More than two-thirds of Texas’ 100 prisons do not have air conditioning.”

We know why the heat is so historic.

“While hot weather is a staple of the summertime and periodic extremes can and do happen, the effects of human-induced climate change on the atmosphere are playing a major role in pushing events into record territory,” according to the Post’s Matthew Cappucci.

A hot planet produced a “heat dome,” Cappucci said, “or a sprawling ridge of high pressure that’s bringing hot, sinking air.” It is stubborn and intense, he said, “refusing to budge as the Lower 48 deals with its impact for the fourth week in a row. While the heat has simmered back a few degrees in California, it’s building once again over the southern Plains, and shows no signs of going anywhere any time soon.”

And it’s not just the heat.

“The recent record temperatures, as well as extreme fires, pollution and flooding we are seeing this year, are what we expect to see in a warmer climate,” Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald told the Associated Press. “We are just getting a small taste for the types of impacts that we expect to worsen under climate change.” 

I said the truth doesn’t need to be revealed. 

I said it’s the lies that are concealing the truth that need to be revealed. 

But I don’t mean climate-change denialism. The Republicans, whose embrace of climate-change denialism had been a core tenet, seem to be moving away from that. The Associated Press said Thursday that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed planting a trillion trees.

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Even if we planted a trillion trees – a big if, if you take McCarthy seriously (I don’t) – that won’t reveal the lie that’s concealing the truth, which is this: everyone is part of the interconnected web of life on this planet. No one is truly alone. No one is suffering from the heat alone.

In truth, we are united.

Even if we somehow overcome climate change, this lie would still endure. The idea that we are individuals who are born alone and die alone will endure. The idea that the truth needs to be revealed will endure. And as long as the lie endures, there will be some crisis or another. Climate change just happens to be the biggest one of all.

And with the biggest crisis of them all, perhaps we shall see the biggest truth of them all – that we’re all human, that we all suffer, that we are all given a limited amount of time to exist on this planet, and that we can, by working together, at least stop hastening our collective demise.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not naive.

But crisis, in this case the biggest crisis, has a way of pushing people, of driving politics, in unpredictable directions. No one knows the future. In that uncertainty, at least, we can have some measure of hope.

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