Heavy thunderstorms have lashed the United Arab Emirates (UAE), dumping more than a year and a half’s rain on the desert city-state of Dubai in just a few hours and flooding major highways and its international airport.
The rains began late on Monday, soaking the sands and roads of Dubai with some 20mm (0.79 inches) of rain, according to meteorological data collected at Dubai International Airport. The storms intensified at about 9am (05:00 GMT) on Tuesday and continued throughout the day, dumping more rain and hail onto the overwhelmed city.
I get the tone of the conversation here (i.e. “hah, good”), but Dubai is a metaphor-made-real for the future world at this point. The wealthy elite in their glittering towers who gorged on a burning planet are fine. They’re far above the water and their biggest inconvenience is the damp wheels of their nine-litre civilian tanks at the water laps on the twenty-lane highways, and that’s the photo that is being splashed across every page. But their wealth and prosperity was built on the backs of the millions of slaves living in shanties and slums living under those highways and on unpaved wastelands. They’re dead but they’d already been marginalized by the elites to the extent that they were legally not really people anyway. They’re disposable and replaceable, they will be disposed of and replaced.
Any hardship experienced by the elite minority will be borne a thousand times over by the proletariat majority. We really need to be careful what we wish for.