Make the Bad Thing Stop

As a Crustacean, that is a citizen of Corpus Christi, or Crustyton, Texas, I have observed that the BP disaster ‘fixes-so-far’ are more Mickey Mouse than McIver. And really there are none. Did I hear right that this thing hemorrhages 800,000 barrels of crude per day? What it looks like it comes to is…no techfix for this…Challenger, Chernobyl, Katrina …Sometimes we don’t’ get caught playing with matches---sometimes we do. Sometimes we are burned beyond recognition like unfortunate children who wouldn’t listen. Sometimes we wake up worried after an evening of fun with the Octomom!

Did I really hear that this could’ve been prevented with a sort of prophylactic device called an acoustic trigger, and that such device costs only $500k a pop, and that BP got a pass from our Interior Dep’t and didn’t have to use it??? Did I hear this? Now, pundits, scholars and sages are beginning to say that there’s no fix. See the Lehrer Report for May 31, 2010---Memorial Day for the Gulf of Mexico. On the News Hour, among several scholars, was one Amy Jaffe—a Senior Energy Advisor at the Baker Institute at Rice University. Here is a quote re public reaction, from the best and the brightest, on this deal:

“So -- and it was really amazing that the industry -- we were sort of running out of oil onshore, and the industry was able to go out to the depths of the earth, under the sea, and keep us driving around in our cars. So, to sit here night after night and watch all these scientists unable to close a simple pipeline, even though it's a very complex engineering problem, as a layperson, when you sit here and watch the oil just spewing out of this pipeline, it is. It's just this horror movie, like we cannot believe that there isn't a technology to close this pipeline. And we, as Americans, believe there's a technological solution to everything. And the idea that we're going to have to wait until August for the technological solution, I think it's just got people just gripped in terror.

OMG, Amy! There’s no fix other than to conserve. Is that so hard? Are we, as wondered before, such narcissistic babies that we can’t do this? Are we that weak as a people? The one certainty is that leaders will never ask the American people to take their share, take responsibility for this, which we should. Everything you see about this suggests that ‘they’ should fix it---the gov’t, the oil companies. What if we go ahead and fix it ourselves by not driving SUVs and by moving out of our McMansions and into right sized houses, etc.
To me, this is a call for the little guy to do her/his part.

But if you pose as a leader, then you have to lead. You have to stand up and tell the folks the truth, for once. Like it is not okay to build a Las Brisas here is Crustyton, because if something goes wrong, and it very likely will, we won’t be able to make the bad thing stop!

If, in addition to braces and a college education, you want your kids to have the luxury of breathing, you will ‘unsupport’ Las Bs if you have not already done do.