If you lived in Hawaii 300 years ago, you wouldn’t even know that ice existed.

Thank about it!!!!
I wasn’t expecting this search results to yield a result but I was wrong https://www.cryopolitics.com/2017/08/19/follow-the-ice-from-alaska-to-hawaii/
Ok fine Hawaii has mountains with snow but I bet there are places where there is no snow and it never drops below freezing and they didn’t know about ice until the 19th century
The lowest recorded temperature in Cape Town South Africa is -1 Celsius, which means if you weren’t around that one day then you never knew about ice.
I bet it was in the middle of the night and everyone sleep through it except one guy who the next morning was trying to explain ice to them and they thought he was crazy.
Spent all night thinking about how hard it must have been for this person to explain ice. “Please believe me!!!!!”
I checked the replies to this thread & a lot of people have chosen the most insulting interpretation possible & think I’m a racist.

To state the obvious: I couldn’t give one fuck about Hawaii or South Africa specifically. It was just a thought about places that don’t get cold.
I would have said Death Valley but I don’t think people lived in Death Valley.
My main point—indeed, my only point—was that if you lived a few hundred years ago in a place where it never got below freezing you didn’t know that ice was a thing. You didn’t know water could do that. One day someone came to your town and blew your fucking mind.
Not only had you never tasted cold water, you didn’t even know that cold water was possible!!!
Someone had to break that news to you! And you had to process that and then they had to prove it to you and then you had to tell your friends “look, it sounds crazy but it’s true: the water can freeze and it can be cold"
Wow, crazy! Think about how sheltered and privileged you are to live now in a time where we have ice makers. You lucky ungrateful jerks. People used to live in fields and have no fucking ice.
“There’s snow at the top of the mountain on the Big Island in Hawaii”

Well what about people who didn’t live on the Big Island? Or what about people who lived on the big island but were disabled and couldn’t climb the mountain?

Stop erasing their experiences
I’m gonna write a one act play about the Hawaiian from there Big Island who hiked up the mountain and learned about snow and then tried to take some down and it melted and he tried desperately to explain to everyone else what happened.
Update: we’re now on day 3 of people being mad about this incredibly banal observation.
Despite the fact that this person expects people to have read books on ice history, I actually didn’t know this! I just googled and learned something else fascinating: The Egyptians invented an ice making machine that worked in the heat https://twitter.com/kilohanakona/status/1335292487779303424
OK this will now be my last series of tweets on Hawaii-Ice-gate. I never intended to make a specific point about the people of Hawaii, past or present.
I was trying to make a point about how prior to modern global connectivity, communities were limited to knowledge they’d experienced.
The “what would I know by geography before the modern world” game is hard to play if you limit it only to areas populated by those of European descent, bc Europe, Asian and the Middle East had been sharing knowledge for a millennia. They knew about things they hadn’t experienced
So, when I was trying to play this game about ice, because “wow, ice is a thing we all take for granted but people from a place that didn’t have temperatures that drop below zero would not personally experience that as much” I thought of a warm isolated island.
However, there is a mountain in Hawaii which is very important and has snow on it. Also, people came to Hawaii from other places. They brought with them knowledge that I confess not to have considered. That was myopic and I am sorry.
It seems as though the better example would be various places in the Caribbean or oceania.
Separately, I strongly don’t think this is a stupid thought I should have kept to myself, since I have also been accused of plagiarizing “One Hundred Days of Solitude.” Seems like a point a lot of people understand is powerful!
I also firmly believe that Twitter is bad and the way it incentivizes people to get outraged about things with zero context )which is what happened here) is intensely destructive.
You can follow @bendreyfuss.
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