BP - Broader Ponderings

Hi folks. I ended my tenure as an unpaid slave of the Federal Government today, working as I was with the United States Attorney. I'm happy to say I have a very nice coffee mug to commemorate my time, and a somewhat cheesy "certificate of appreciation." Who says the feds can't do swag?

Anyways, I've been thinking lately about this whole BP fiasco off in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, everyone is quite consternated as of late. The government is consternated that BP can't get its shit together, and take care of its own mess. BP is consternated that the government is making threats it apparently can't back up - for instance, that it will take control of the well plugging. And the public, in general, is pissed off at both.

As far as I'm concerned, the whole thing is just kind of a shitshow. A disaster of unprecedented proportion - more than likely worse than Exxon Valdez - in an underwater environment that no one really knows how to operate in. The federal government can't do too much except hope that BP can plug the well, since the government lacks the expertise to do it itself. And as seems to be the case, maybe BP, the creator of this destruction, doesn't quite know how to fix it either.

Check out these photos from the Boston Globe. They're incredible.

Anyways, a good friend of mine made a very prescient observation the other day, and I'm inclined to share it here. It's quite easy to get angry at BP, or at the government, or at both. More difficult, is to examine why we are having this problem in the first place. Meaning, why is it that we're drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico in the first place? Of course, there's a simple, yet disconcerting answer to that question - addiction.

We're all subject to it, of course, no one is really completely innocent - unless you're one of those folks that lives completely off the grid in Vermont somewhere. I'd venture to say those folks make up a minority of the US populace though. The cruel, simple fact, is that we keep drilling for oil in these completely unsuitable conditions, so that we can feed our addiction. I think this a difficult thing to digest, because we, as Americans; we don't like to look inwards for blame. We just seem to be a people who will do almost anything to avoid accepting responsibility.

Maybe I'm a bit cynical here, or maybe I possess an antiquated sense of moral justice, but it seems to me that in this spirit, people are also unwilling to undergo the hardship to fully experience things. Maybe it's only in baseball that self-sacrifice is still a worthy virtue. Not to mean that one should always be sacrificing oneself, but it makes zero sense to me that people are so concerned for their own convenience, their own self interest, as to go out of their way to confront themselves.

This is a bit confusing conceptually, though it makes perfect sense as I type it. Of course, this is just how confusing things work. The mark of a good writer, is to make the complex simple, whilst retaining the illusion of complexity. I'm still working on that quality, obviously.

Needless to say, back to the oil, we're drilling because we're addicted. The rig exploded because we're drilling. Sure, there was an intervening cause, but if we want to get a fuller view of the causation at issue here, we need to look at ourselves. Our unwillingness to make the sacrifices - financial, cultural, political, ideological - to fix the mess we've found ourselves in.

Anyways, that's what I think about that.