Life is Fair

This goddamn oil geyser has me so disgusted I can hardly muster anger. A week ago, I would have written that this wasn't a political issue- that this was the rare catastrophe that brought us all together to take an honest look at how to prevent it from ever happening again. But now the usual suspects are all over the news. They (I won't name names; you know who they are) are mad because the government, which they do not believe in, has not done enough to fix this mess, and they're mad at the President for not doing enough, and then mad again when he gets BP to pony up $20 billion dollars, "He's doing too much!" Some of them actually called it a shakedown! Can you believe it? Of course you can.

Look, this hole cannot be plugged. It's going to gush until it has killed the Gulf, and its shores and the livelihoods of an entire generation of people who depend on those things. My mom always used to tell me, when I went to her with a complaint, "Life is not fair." That drove me crazy. And it still does. For the most part, we get what we deserve. And we are getting it, and getting it, now. Maybe some (I'm looking at you BP!) deserve more punishment than others, but the blame for this mess lies with all of us.

BP cut corners. Hey surprise! They lied to us. They knew it would happen sooner or later. And they gambled on "later"; after they had made such an obscene pile of money that they could pay us off and get the hell out of Dodge. A winning gambler, on a roll, plays his bet, but not his winnings. He leaves his bet on the table until he loses it. Then he takes his winnings and goes home. BP did that, plus stacked the deck.

Our government (Dick Cheney) allowed energy companies to write the policies under which they are governed. And under the watch of all of our fearless leaders, oil companies have gone on cutting corners, and fudging numbers, and on and on. And did our government protect us? It did not. The people who were supposed to be regulating the oil industry were instead doing cocaine with them. And fucking them. Seriously.

And we let it all happen. We're like mob lawyers: we may not be breaking the law ourselves, but we're benefiting from those who do, and we don't want to ask too many questions. But now those questions have been answered anyway. I wonder if we'll have the courage to cut our ties with these criminals and try to make it on our own.