Monday, July 5, 2010

No News Is Bad News

The time has come when I can no longer watch TV coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill. The mute button helps. But there are still those dying birds, animals and reptiles on video. Not that this matter doesn’t interest me, quite the opposite. There’s nothing in the news that concerns me more.  It’s that the situation doesn’t change from day to day, other than varying guesses over how much oil is going into the Gulf. This is a case where no news is bad news.

The public and media have yet to realize the gravity of the situation. Calling it “the worst oil related disaster in American history” while quite true is a major understatement.  On maps we see a dark glop in the northern Gulf of Mexico. But that glop isn’t going to stay there and most Americans will eventually feel the effects, even if the leak is stopped tomorrow.  A major portion of the breeding grounds for species of world fish, tuna for one, has already been destroyed. Until it is stopped the flow will continue and the size of the spill will increase unabated. If the relief wells don’t do the job will the spill continue until the well goes dry?     

As threats to mankind go the Cuban Missile Crisis had always seemed the greatest in my lifetime.  Disaster was averted then because Kennedy, Khrushchev and the people they represented were not suicidal. In this case only one of the adversaries is human and capable of things like reason and emotion. “Mother nature” is only a figure of speech.

If there is an effective response to this monumental disaster it has yet to reach anyone in a position to act on it, so for practical purposes there is none. Having no remedy for an accident this serious that has already taken place, it is unthinkable that we continue a practice that we have been demonstrably unable to make perfect. Even if a satisfactory response to this situation is developed, what of something unanticipated?

It’s naïve to expect the “drill baby drill” people to admit being wrong. It’s against their nature. Many of them, particularly those who spend money supporting this point of view, do pretty well for themselves by means of this willful ignorance. For whatever reason there have always been and always will be people oblivious in the face of such convincing evidence. What frightens me is the possibility, if not the likelihood, that they will continue to prevail. 

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