Just spill it

When you try to block something out, it seems that it bothers you even more. Well, I actually even know this, as it is the "what you resist persists" philosophy. But sometimes you see things you don't really want to and then it just stays with you ... it's like having a stalker.

It was this one that hit me particularly hard. Especially since the other morning I sat on my toilet and watched two large crows at the tippity top of a tree try to dry their wings in the rain. I was struck by the way they kept lifting a wing, waiting, then squawking a few times, then lifting the other wing, and putting the first one down. How could they balance on that tiny branch with all that movement?

But this bird. How can it possibly live? Is it even humane to clean it off and attempt it? Every part of that small bird's body has been infected by the crap it is covered with. Do we want to keep these birds alive only for them to breed and end up with who know's what. Will evolution provide these animals with the means to clean oil off themselves with what appears to be an inevitable oil spill?

I am really not doing this for shock purposes. If you feel completely useless and unable to fathom why they can't stop it -- then you feel like I have felt most of my life. Unable to comprehend why people don't DO something about something. Why people prefer to complain and bitch and moan but never oh never ever take steps to stop something. I've long since made peace with the fact that one person can not change a bad institution, but they can change their own circumstances.

With that said, there is nothing I can do with this problem. I haven't invented something that can suck up oil and I do not have massive amounts of cash that I can give to the people who have lost their jobs. I have no desire to wash oil off of marine life -- and to be honest, I don't want to get cancer ten years from now because I did so. Yes, that sounds crazy selfish but it is also brutally honest. I, in truth, want to stay as far away as I possibly can from this mess and pretend it's not happening.

And you probably want to do the same thing -- because talking about it doesn't change anything. The pictures of the oil gushing out into the ocean, millions of gallons worth, is like aliens landing in the middle of Times Square. You shoot them and their supertough bulletproof skin deflects them. They look at you and you melt. What the hell are you going to do? RUN!

There ARE people who have the capability of stopping this. I have no doubt about it. What is getting in the way is the usual red tape and government agency nonsense and I can only hope that there are people with pure hearts and the technology who are sneaking out and doing something behind the backs of the enforcers of rules. I don't want to read about anything bad, and I don't want to see pictures of dead animals, because it makes me sick. But we are a society that puts no value on human life when it comes to the bottom line, so a couple cazillion dead fish and birds is not worth discussing, I am sure.

This is now a part of our history. The lives directly affected by this toxic poison will be lost from this day forward, and maybe, or maybe not, rightly tied to it. It may or may not be mentioned ten years from now how the number of women with breast cancer spiked in 2020 in the gulf region. The animals lost will never be counted. The jobs will be lumped into the pile of unemployment figures and will eventually bottom out as new jobs are created -- whatever they will be.

And the group of people who comprised policy and made the decisions that created this disaster will be long gone -- living in the cleanest, most pristine sections of the world, sipping mai tai's and lamenting the millions they lost those years their BP stock went down.

I am not really sure where I was going with this when I started and I am not sure I was successful in meeting the goal I intended! I remember feeling such great empathy for the oil battered bird, and I know I tried really hard not to go off against big business and "those people" who do these things to us! I think I was trying to find something good within something so bad, but is there any?

So why all the pictures? Because BP doesn't want these pictures "out there." The more people immerse themselves in the awfulness of this tragedy, the louder the cries of "GET 'EM" will ring across the land. BP keeps press off the beaches. Did you know this? They don't want their shareholders to get scared, so there is definitely an air of downplay to this whole thing. That whole Facebook thing about where are the concerts, the telethons, the celebrities flooding to the region to help? Yeah, so, why is it that no one wants to do those things? Seems to be that when it happens in foreign lands there is some push from somewhere to get the American name on the marquee of "being helpful." But here, none of that seems to happen. It's all so. Wrong.

Except it is the way it is. "They," my ever favorite friend and foe, is doing everything they can to suppress the reality of what is going on -- and they sure as hell don't want any big old concert with dead animals being discussed and the fact that an entire coast could potentially be ruined for decades to come.

So in the end, as much as you don't want to, talk about it, look at the pictures and ask yourself WHAT THE HELL IS BEING DONE, and then ask someone else that question and hopefully someone out there will give us an answer.

Because if we are quiet, we are not only ignoring a huge disaster, we are also losing an opportunity to make sure this never happens again.