Everyone is writing and talking about the oil spill. I guess I am too. What a mess. What a disaster. I have these recurring bizarre thoughts that the hole will never get plugged and eventually the world's seawater will be replaced by oil. Only problem is it can't be used because it is too salty.
We're actually dealing with multiple disasters here. First there's the damage from the spill itself. Anyone who tells you what the extent is and will be might as well be pumping golf balls into the hole. No one knows yet, and no one will know for some time. Predicting it has to be more difficult than trying to figure out what Apple's next iPhone will be. Oh, wait, we already know that.
Next up is the political muck that all the politicians and talking heads are wading through. For some reason I feel like every time I hear someone talking about the politics of the matter, Tina Turner needs to be singing "We need a hero" in the background. I don't know the ins and outs of this, but from where I sit there is plenty of blame to go around. BP and the other companies in line should be forced to clean up the damn thing with a gun to their head. Send the boyish looking CEO down 5000 feet in some sort of diving suit or diving bell that doesn't exist and hope he gets crushed by the pressure. He isn't going to last much longer anyway. Line up the politicians from all sides who love deregulation and campaign contributions from Big Oil, and make them walk the beaches cleaning up tar balls and dead and soiled animals. Tell James Carville to lay off the Tennessee Williams analogies. Big Daddy never tackled a fight he couldn't win, and this one has looked un-winable from the beginning. That said, Carville has a point. While the Obama administration really can't do anything other than coordinate and put on the pressure, they've looked more like oil covered sea birds wondering what just hit them than they have adults who are in charge. The largest political irony of this is all of those who want less government are screaming for the government to do more. You got to love that one.
And speaking of Katrina, which everyone loves to do, the other recurring thought I have is what happens when we see a hurricane pass through the gulf this season and pick up all that oily water and dump it inland? Don't think that's not on everyone's mind dealing with this. Here's hoping if it happens that it all gets dumped on Houston.
Through all of this, I get this creepy feeling that this is some sort of disaster flick like episode that doesn't have the heroic ending. There's no way to send Bruce Willis and a team of misfits down 5000 feet to plug the hole. I'm sure everyone who has any involvement in this is working as hard as they can to come up with a solution and feeling more and more miserable as the oil continues to gush and the minutes, hours, days, weeks, pass by. But we may have created the problem that humans and technology can't solve.
Side note: This is the first time in I don't know how long, if ever, that I've seen gas prices drop heading into the Memorial Day weekend. Around these parts, we're seeing prices twenty cents below what they were 10 days ago. Curious.
