I can’t close the vent in my bedroom the entire way. Each vent blade twists shut individually, but the last blade is too close to the metal frame for me to get my fingers in. Air-conditioned air blows into my bedroom. I sit in the cold will of my roommates.

The heat of July and August can warrant air conditioning. When the air is too humid to breathe, and is sits on your skin, crawling and salty, then I make exceptions. But the people I live with are uncomfortable when the air temperature goes above 65 degrees. The windows are left shut and we sit inside a hermetically-sealed apartment.

The April wind blows uninterrupted outside, stupid and placid over the dirty ground and the hard trees. The broken Earth leans toward our burden, the cancerous sun. Out there, heat and ultra-violet light are nature’s flaws, the things we must avoid.

Ban the sun. Ban anything that might harm. Ban smoking and hamburgers—ban pitchers who throw over 45 mph. Know what? ban humanity. Ban life. Ban God. Let’s move beyond existence. Let’s be safe—let’s buy into exactly the paranoid ultra-conservative bullshit ultra-liberals think is the answer to everything. Ban hypocrisy. Ban love.

This all started a couple nights ago when I walked through the cold, watching my breath steam out in front of me into the dark, into the streetlight of Westmoreland’s parking lot.

I shivered off the cold in the elevator and walked into my refrigerated apartment. The thermostat was set at 58 degrees.

My politically-progressive roommate said he wanted a breeze.

I tear up when I hear great speeches about change. I want change. I want an America that isn’t so American. I want an America that respects limitations. I want an America that makes sense.

I don’t know what to call myself—but I hope someone finds a name for people like me. I’m a conservative who is sick of liberals—I am a liberal who is disgusted with conservatives.

People like me believe in secularism and we believe in Jesus, but we believe he taught tolerance. Not just tolerance, but love, and love of everyone, whites, blacks, Jews and gays. The Jesus I love loves fags. The Jesus I love knew giving everything is refusing to be anyone. The Jesus I love is no one at all because he could love in the bravest of ways, without fear.

And this is where I’m a hypocrite. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of air conditioning.

This fear wouldn’t be alarming; I could be ok with it, if I didn’t believe, if I didn’t know that air conditioning was a kind of abandonment of the uncomfortable things that are inherently human. I wouldn’t be worried if I couldn’t see where this trend headed. I wouldn’t be concerned if it didn’t seem so harmless. It’s just air conditioning—get over yourself, I could think.

Air conditioning helps the elderly, those in hospitals, I know. Shut-up already, I sometimes think. Thankfully, I’m reasonable: I would never turn off the air conditioning off on and 85-year-old on the 42nd story of his apartment building.

I would turn it off on the 20-year-old on the third floor who wants “a breeze.”

I might sound like a crazy man—it doesn’t seem to make any sense that I connect air conditioning to the fall of western society. But what I do not believe in is decadence, and more importantly: decadence disguised as progress. I love many of my own limitations too much to ever feel I might overcome them.

And so I will be a regretful hypocrite. That night I came out of the cold and into the air conditioning, I hated my roommates. I wanted them to stop existing. I wanted them and the shopping malls and car dealerships to disappear into the universe of things that can never last.

But that’s not who they are. They are human beings who aren’t just more important than me, but who must be more important than me. I can only hope to be as meaningless as the dirt. That’s the only way I could ever stand myself.