Brainshambles

I’ve spent hours looking at photos and watching videos chronicling the most catastrophic environmental disaster in U.S. history. The gulf oil spill.

In 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit, I drove from Ohio all the way to New Orleans over a weekend. After spending only a few days there assisting in the animal rescue efforts, I came back with a new appreciation for both humanity and the true size and power of nature. After witnessing first hand the devastation caused by “the worst environmental disaster in decades”, I would go on to write countless papers and speeches about the event. Five years passed, and I still maintained an immense sense of respect and reverence for Katrina. Never would I have imagined seeing such devastation hit my soil again. But it isn’t just my soil. It belongs to my potential offspring, my friends, the entire globe. And really…it doesn’t belong to anyone or anything. We belong to IT.

So here we are in 2010, and my attention is conveniently pointed back towards the gulf coast. The oil spill absolutely rips at my soul, making me physically ill. Every essence of my being wants to drop everything, just like I did in 2005 and rush to to gulf. I want to be there, I want to get my hands dirty. I want to feel little and small and take accountability for this disaster. BP feeds off of people like me. We live our monotonous lives on repeat, thinking only of how we are going to get through the next day (or even 10 years) of our lives. I stopped looking at fuel prices years ago. It all became numb to me because I had no control. If I didn’t have memories of my New Orleans rescue or follow the news, I might not even feel particularly impacted by this oil spill. How absolutely selfish…

It’s not as if riding my bike to work would stop me from relying on big oil. My lip balm, my body wash, my hair products…everything around me owns stock in this game of vicious sea-floor bloodletting.

What sickens me the most is that it takes one enormous oil spill affecting AMERICA to re-direct my attention to environmental and social injustice. I wish I could be better than that.

My heart cries for the sea.