The Positive Voices

Who is to blame for the BP oil disaster that’s dominating the news? There are many answers. Texas Governor Rick Perry, known as the conservative’s conservative, provided my favorite. He thinks God did it. At least he called the spill “an act of God,” which is pretty much the same thing. An oil company goes out into the Gulf of Mexico to sink a well two miles into the bottom with a mile of water on top. When its equipment breaks down and the well starts sending vast clouds of oil into the environment, one of its bought-and-paid-for politicians blames God for the mess. Still, I give the governor’s answer high marks for originality. Texans must be proud. My second favorite answer came from Sarah Palin, Alaska’s gift to Tina Fey. She blamed President Barack Obama. Not for the leak so much as for taking “so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing.” Pretty much any politician can talk without saying anything, but it takes a kind of genius to make a statement that is so empty of meaning yet still works “doggone” into the sentence. It is a beautiful thing to see. She has the secondbest answer to almost everything. They’re both wrong. Blame spread is blame denied, and that’s what fingers are for--pointing. In that spirit, I accuse… You. Yes you there, wearing your complacency like a suit of medieval armor, proud that you only have three cars in your family and that you keep the thermostat at 70 degrees in the winter. BP is out there drilling in deep water to feed our oil addiction, just as the drug lords of Colombia and Mexico kill to feed our addiction to cocaine, pot, and heroin. As John Vidal, writing in The Guardian, a British newspaper, said: “If the industry were forced to really clean up the myriad messes it causes, the price would jump and the switch to clean energy would be swift.”