Patriotism and global markets, the parts that make the whole, and weird visions of vehicles underwater. This is where we left off, a tad shade short of whimsical and a tad too far past irrational to quite understand anything logically. This is the age of unreason.
...a slow and silent stream,
Lethé, the River of Oblivion, rolls
Her wat'ry labyrinth... ~Milton, Paradise Lost, II
It seems we just keep hearing about this awful oil spill off of our Gulf Coast. It’s been 40 days or so now. 40 long days and it appears it won’t end or stop anytime soon. How far are you willing to go, how close to the edge do we really want to take this awful beast that we are losing our grip on. The reins slip and the slick has been let out of the geologic bag. We’re becoming saturated with talk about how another measure fails. How the anger is rising, anger focused largely close to home in the gulf with a fading radius where only some of us are really feeling it up here in Virginia, where drilling has been put on hold for now. It wasn’t close enough to the Chesapeake Bay. This time.
"We are not near the end."
~ Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
Deepwater Horizon started drilling on February 15, 2010. They finished around April 17, the explosion happening 3 days later, killing 11 crew members. Some tried to say it was eco-sabotage, occurring on the anniversary of Earth Day, a convoluted plot of outlandish proportions. Deep sea robots tried to close the well. We hear from the Department of Interior it may take 3 months, a 90-ton containment dome capped the gusher and the hole froze from Burning ice, methane hydrates. Stuck a straw into it, spill cam pops on and who knows if it’s looping or not, all hope is put into a ‘top kill’ that works temporarily and fails while another massive wobbling 22 mile plume is found. Top hats and variations of containment domes are en route.
Let us not forget a third of the world’s dispersants purchased. Out of sight out of mind, as well as out of reach of the magical booms missing the underwater currents dragging the newly bonded oils across the seafloor and working their way to our coasts unguarded, rising up the food chain, eventually into our synergistic stews of chemical filled bodies.
As long as the claims for peaceful atomic bomb surgeons aren’t allowed as some Russians are speaking of as well as American bomb scientists.
"Paint me a cavernous waste shore
Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,
Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks
Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.
~ T.S. Eliot
Hurricane season starts on the Atlantic tomorrow, swirling fears of an oil laden storm sweeping across the coast, hurling more than frog or fish this time. Warm ocean waters and the Gulf's tendency to produce mighty storms mix for the potential makings of a nasty storm surge.
I’m wondering why there hasn’t been more of an outcry against this disaster. We’re hearing some serious claims and scary predictions about what this could do to our economy, our national security, our health, our happiness. All of which stem from our ecosystems.
“A moratorium on drilling will be the economic blow that will kill us,“ said Charlotte Randolph, President of LaFourche Parish, worried about job loss. She doesn’t want the drilling to stop. People are saying some people rely on BP for the livelihoods. I guarantee more rely on clean air and water for their lives. It’s time to rethink the status quo. It’s time to man and woman up, dig our heels in, bite the bullet, and come up with some real solutions.
How will this effect offshore drilling in the near future? Seven Greenpeace activists wrote a message to everyone in oil asking an important question. Is the Arctic next?
“I don’t know what’s making people sick, but I don’t think it’s the food.” unknown
The first workers have begun to get nose bleeds and become sick, ones working close to where the dispersants were sprayed. The plume is growing at alarming rates. And it seems we have months before it may stop. Hidden hydrocarbons beneath the surface spreading along secret routes.
I find it very strange and a little eerie, closing in on sickening, when I think about the true volume of this. And I’m glad people like James Carville, a wise southerner and political assassin, is telling it how it is. So why are we not hearing more of a fuss from the general public? The fisherman are getting riled up, but not those that they feed.
"Dis President needs to tell BP I’m your daddy…" ~ James Carville
“We need nature to be fully alive: air, food, warmth, spiritual…We live as if nature is only needed to provide extras: paper, recreation, specialty foods, a job to provide money.
~Susan Griffin, Women and Nature, 1978
The wetlands will soak up a large portion of this mess. As well as many estuarine creatures we tend to consume. There’s a lot of blame and anger going towards BP right now. Like a social magnifier they are sucking up a lot of negativity from this accident that perhaps could have been prevented with proper safeguards drilling at such depths. I hear people say, “Isn’t it just awful.” Yes.
I think we are either accepting it as something out of our control or either we’re not becoming more enraged about it because of it’s seemingly invisible grip on us all. I’ve purchased gas at BP plenty of times over the years. Does that mean this is partially my fault as much as theirs? I am feeding demand after all. I think there in lies part of this problem.
This upends questions for the public, months of gushing, hopefully molding our ethos into a more realistic view that fossil fuels are not as ‘cheap’ as they are touted to be and these externalities are as real as our current situation.
Those sort of biting ticks at the back of your mind make some people uneasy, not quite ready to accept such awful truths, and instead, making some sort of detachment from it because nobody wants to believe this is just as much our fault as BP’s because we’re not demanding something better, cleaner, or safer.
If you’re asking does America’s future depend on oil, I would say we as a nation ought to be moving away from our deadly addiction to oil. Not only because of the damage it is doing to the Gulf but we are exporting, we are borrowing a billion dollars a day in our country. Mainly from nations that don’t share our values in order to import a billion dollars of oil from nations that don’t share our values, largely, and many that are downright hostile towards us.
~Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on CNN
Lets get it straight, we will burn oil for quite some time and nothing is going to change overnight, but we need to get the ball rolling on this transition that right now is stuck in the viscous old mindsets and profit driven throes of petroleum like dinosaurs in the tar sands, immobilized and covered by the source of our downfall.
There isn’t enough clarity within our social consciousness to envision something different than our current state of affairs. Another path. Yet. Oil is so inherently involved with our daily lives from vehicles, plastics, our homes, and our food. It’s hard to look at something with disdain when we’re so carelessly and covetously covered with it.
It’s just not the emotion jarring angst and empathy that we feel when we see baby sea turtles and birds covered in the dark toxic sludge. We gulp it down in small enough concentrations that we never really feel those ill effects right away, an invisible and addictive coating that we just can’t help but feed. And let us remind ourselves where most oil comes from, financing the other side of this decadent and depraved war that many of our brave soldiers are mixed up in now.
Or other forums of massive social and energy injustice, like a large amount of Shell’s oil. Nigeria and the Niger delta have been hit with oil spills nonstop, yet we here next to nothing about it.
"With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. Locals blame the oil that pollutes their land and can scarcely believe the contrast with the steps taken by BP and the US government to try to stop the Gulf oil leak and to protect the Louisiana shoreline from pollution." ~John Vidal
Even our ‘homegrown oil’ has very large risks and reasons why it is not a safe choice. The creed is greed. It’s much more sneaky and sly that way. It’s always in the subtleties, the details, the cunning warming hand of hard capitalism that lullabies us into some hypnotic trance of continued support and unwavering complacency.
That’s why there isn’t more of a public outcry. We're hooked. Because we feel powerless. Because we drove to work or the store between hearing the latest news about the continued gush of oil at a newer and higher rate or after the next step failed. What some would say are merely efforts to buy time and show some semblance of trying. Yes, they want to close the leak, but they seem to believe it won’t happen until the release valves are drilled, sometime in August, the worst possible outcome.
We’re so connected to it. It is all of our fault, and that’s something nobody wants to swallow. But we should. Could this catastrophe be enough to spark serious change? Or will it take more? And how much will we have to spoil our surroundings before we say enough is enough and the wheels of cleaner energy get serious backing from governments and research and development gets what it should.
"More than anything else, this economic and environmental tragedy –- and it's a tragedy -– underscores the urgent need for this nation to develop clean, renewable sources of energy. Doing so will not only reduce threats to our environment, it will create a new, homegrown, American industry that can lead to countless new businesses and new jobs.
...If nothing else, this disaster should serve as a wake-up call that it's time to move forward on this legislation. It's time to accelerate the competition with countries like China, who have already realized the future lies in renewable energy. And it's time to seize that future ourselves." ~President Obama at Deepwater BP Oil Spill Presidential Press Conference
Right now it seems China is much ahead of the United States in this front, and whoever gets the best foundation in clean energy technology established is going to dominate the global market within the next 50 years in that regard. Talk about national security.
"Death leaves a heartache no one can heal
Love leaves a memory no one can steal."
~ a gravestone in Ireland
VP Biden delivers remarks at Arlington National Cemetery
More than 300,000 people are buried at Arlington National Ceremony, one of the most somber places I've ever walked through. It's hard to walk through there without thinking about the blood and strife and fight that allow us the ease of life we have today. It makes me think we have a responsibility, a right to fulfill our continuance in a sane manner in honor and memory of the foundation before us. Sure we have a bloody and at times controversial history fraught with wrong doing, but at some point don’t we decide in our struggle to remain atop this clandestine version of king of the hill we ought to take the high road and try to remember what life with dignity and honor looks like amidst our perverted and warped lens of politics.
This is a solemn day, a day we remember all those that have died so we may live in the comforts of ease. Memorial Day makes me think about what so many have fought so hard to give us. Some idea of democracy, a place where hard work can get you somewhere. This isn't the land our grandparents grew up in. The sharpened teeth and claw of capitalism have bastardized democracy and our power structure into some sick choking spreading blob of wrathful facades, imperialism, and closed door deals settled over scotch and oily hands.
It is Memorial Day, a slight drizzle is falling against the backdrop of thunder and lightning, and I’m feeling like we’ve never been so unpatriotic in our hard and short history and culture. The America I knew as a child seems like a ghost. Playing in the woods and swinging on the porch in the evening watching lightning bugs come out and more stars than you can imagine. Now we’re a sprawling urban landscape of cookie cutter houses and commercialism, satellites occupying the starless city nights. Environmental catastrophes ingrained into normalcy.
I’m sure people by the millions are buying millions worth of food and goods from Wal-Mart and other branches of the People’s Republic of China Merchandise Distribution Center this Memorial Day Weekend. As opposed to going out and getting some local, American raised burgers from the farmer’s market this weekend. Along with cherries and strawberries, which are in and oh so sweet. Or maybe not sitting on some picnic cloth from thousands of miles away but grandma’s old quilt she knit with 5 other friends over laughs and memories. What is occurring in this place that became famous the world over for that old encompassing American Dream.
How did that dream of so much become ransacked by petroleum, plastic, and foreign products? I wonder what our forefathers and foremothers would say about this. The stranglehold of products over camaraderie. This falsehood of freedom. We may be privileged and have it way too easy but we lack real freedom, and that is something that has been drawing fear and loathing about our nation for some time.
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
~ Woody Guthrie
Impartial analysis of our decisions and policy falls so far from the truth our market chugs on like an ill programmed robot vacuum cleaner banging into the corner counting it's distance as progression as the wheels turn and bump and go nowhere near practical helpfulness with the sadomasochist tendencies of an abused child who snuck into a place of power with vengeance and wanderlust seared into their dark heart. Yes, some evil parasitic android with humanistic tendencies running amok across our homeland and the global market. An evil mechanical bastard child on the loose feeding on our patriotism, nepotism, and memory banks prolonging a false view of American ideals into a new and strange world suckling all it can while it can until the well of profitable ignorance is dry. Horrid. Just horrid.
“The oil companies and other giant corporations have a stranglehold on American policies and behavior, and are choking off the prospects of a viable social and economic future for working people and their families.”
~Bob Herbert
I feel more alone in my fear and loathing these days, like the feeling has subsided, a hiccup in the revolution. There are thousands of our youth and good hearted folk who are feeling the flames of change and are motivated to secure a more just and clean future, but my mind is weighed down under the viscous slop of this oil spill that is gushing ever so as these 1’s and 0’s exist in whatever electron world of the internet civilization. I am more and more worried about the lag time of apathy, topsy-turvy tipping points, and putting band aids on bullet holes.
The buffering capacity of the ocean is already reaching it’s threshold in regards to carbon sequestration, and while thousands of barrels of oil pump into our watery homeostasis regulator, millions of cars zoom down the road where the American Dream was born. It’s time to realign ourselves with a new Dream, something that doesn’t draw worry and stomach pangs about our children and the womb of tomorrow. How much will it take to show us capricious carbon wastefulness of fossil fuels is making all of us fossil fools on a trend to make us fossils.
Humanity is being shaped by the lovers of injustice, that alluring and crazed eyed magician Loren Eiseley spoke of.
“…a magician in the shape of his own collective brain, that unique and spreading force which in its manipulations will precipitate the last miracle, or like the sorcerer’s apprentice, wreak the last disaster. The possible nature of the last disaster the world of today has made all too evident: man has become a spreading blight which threatens to efface the green world that created him…the nature of the human predicament is: how nature is to be reentered; how man, the relatively unthinking and proud creator of the second world - the world of culture - may revivify and restore the first world which cherished and brought him into being.”
The nasty truths nobody wants to swallow. This oil spill is as much our fault as BP’s. Fossilized algae under extreme pressure. BP CEO Tony Hayward is feeling some of that unleashed pressure now, and we’re all bound to feel it sooner or later. The question now is to what extent. How many canaries in the coal mines and vicious smacks to our egos and grappling of reality do we need to wake up to the challenges of this new millennium.
I think about wanting to be more patriotic this year. I want to support my neck of the woods, help clean up my community, form new bonds and reconnect with my neighbors. This is a time of reflection into the iridescent sheen of our actions. I want to buy local, eat local, be local. Turn off the television and have conversations. Get my hands dirty in the garden. Walk in the woods and be in awe of what the Creator has given us. I can feel my roots run deep in the beautiful mountains and rolling Piedmont of Virginia and I’m proud of my heritage. I want to feel proud for what I leave behind whenever the time comes that I and my generation give up the ghost.
What will this oil spill teach us of our past and how will it effect our view of our future? We lost our morality factor. Righteousness exalteth a nation. Liberty in a wasteland is meaningless. It is time for reflection. It is time for a return to decency. Permaculture of the land and mind. Many sense something is wrong but our minds are too wallowed in petroleum to read into the pulsing plumes that enter our ocean, twisted war shack of our twisted short sightedness. Let us pray we regain our atavistic endeavors, our instinctual clinging, and join together to rise above our fallacies into the truth and beauty of our strange species recreating a vision of a world where freedom exists on all fronts and we no longer pollute ourselves with dominating greed and toxic dreams we buy and invest in. Not utopia, but also not a land dictated by these toxic connections to everything we do. Let us invest in common sense and tomorrow, stop pulling from future equity in some frenzied chaos of plastic conversations and sew the seeds of a green and fresh start.
For now the flow follows onward.
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