DP on BP

Be sure to check out Part I of this post here. 

At one point in your busy day, you will probably fill up your gas tank because you’ve driven so much lately. I’ll be doing it for the second time since I started writing this later today, in fact. Ooh, but you need to avoid that BP station. They are bad people. They spill oil in the ocean, and cause innocent animals to die. It makes you feel bad. All that beautiful ocean, ruined for a very long time, all thanks to oil companies and their ocean drilling. You knew we shouldn’t be drilling in the ocean. You’re so angry right now!  

There are plenty of other places to be drilling so we can avoid the oceans, right? How about Alaska! Oh wait, we own that. We don’t want that place getting ruined, too. Well, now we need another place to satisfy our need for oil, preferably somewhere that we don’t own. Hm, we can’t drill in the oceans, because bad things happen, Alaska is off limits because its so damn beautiful and densely populated… OH! How about we drill the crap out of the Middle East! We don’t own that, and we find their deserts to be unappealing for both a permanent residence and vacation hot spot. Problem solved.

Oh, wait though. You kind of remember a few years ago bitching relentlessly about gas prices going up to and over four dollars a gallon. I guess you didn’t really care then where the hell they were drilling; you just wanted to get to McDonalds without spending more money getting there than you made working  there. Appears there is a problem with this new drilling method: when we don’t control the supply, we have no control over the price. But you really don’t want to ruin beautiful Alaska, or drill in our oceans. I guess we have a problem.

If you stop and think about it, we really don’t care where our stuff comes from until something goes horribly wrong, because we really like it when they get our stuff cheaply.  When something does go wrong, however, we get angry. We were all, for the most part, perfectly content with them drilling in our oceans. Very few of us probably even thought twice about it. But now something has gone wrong, and we are angry and blaming everything and everyone except ourselves.

“No, this is BP’s fault. I know, for a fact. They cut corners which caused this.” Oh my god! A company cut corners?! In a recession!?! Wait… did they save money too by cutting those corners!? I knew it. This is outrageous. This is completely, … completely ridiculous. I can’t believe this happened, because it has probably never happened in the history of mankind! … Oh, Ha, oh wait no it does. It happens all the time.

Say they took the more expensive route and didn’t cut those corners. Gas prices just went up 20 cents per gallon. You probably didn’t notice that, but then a few weeks later, they choose the expensive route again. Another 20 cents it goes. Ha! And there it goes again. Did you see that? Oh man, that was fun. Now what? Do you praise them for making the right choices? No, you have no idea that they made the right choices. You just know that gas went up two dollars and you start to bitch about how high gas prices are.

“Well, Dan, they should have at least prepared a little in advance for a leak I mean, seriously. ”Oh yes, just like the architect of the World Trade Center should have planned for his buildings to collapse with people in them, BP should have planned for a huge explosion on their oil rigs causing a pipe to break. People died in that explosion, but you probably didn’t know that. Unforeseeable shit happens. Even if it is foreseeable, like may have been the case for BP, sometimes there really just isn’t anything you can do about it. This is not any one company’s fault. This is our fault but it doesn’t matter. Life will go on, and over time this will fade away just like jean shorts did 30 years ago. We need to own our mess, not just the podium at the Olympics (ooh, sorry Canada, we got more medals than you, too soon?) (They weren’t even second). If everyone could just admit to it, then we’d be in a much better place.

There was actually some good from this oily mess. I bet you didn’t expect that, now did you. Click here.

Damn it, now I’m sad because I thought about the Olympics

Our Obsession with Mobility

America is such a great place. If you don’t agree, we don’t want you here. Move to Mexico. I’ll see you in a week. …With the swine flu and four less fingers from one of the six nights you were robbed and raped. Maybe you should reconsider.

The US is where we are today because you like to spend money. “But I don’t have any money,” you say in a whiney homo voice. I say to you, “Oh yes, you with your four dollar brand name espresso and 60 dollar (I’m probably being generous) jean shorts.” Seriously, throw those shorts away; I feel dirty just looking at you.

Money is what makes the world go ‘round. It’s not love or the Earth’s natural rotation. You’re stupid just for thinking that. No, my friend, it’s cold hard cash. You may not agree, but we just agreed that you're stupid, so you would be wrong. This post is long enough without me explaining that, too.

Oh capitalism! We love you. “But I don’t like capitalism, Dan.” You know, you’re probably right, reading this off of your 1,500 dollar iMac. Maybe you’re on the go, reading this on your 150 dollar mobile device with a 100 dollar monthly fee attached to it. That’s true though, you probably don’t like capitalism. It’s bad. You can move to Africa! There sure as hell isn’t any capitalism there! Just AIDs.

You enjoy the life you live today because of our capitalistic society, and there is nothing wrong with that. You would probably prefer to have it no other way. No, it’s not like this in some other parts of the world, but those places have problems that are hundreds of times worse than ours. Hunger, disease, rampant poverty, creepy kinky sex (seriously Europe, how the hell did you become that way), and the list can go on forever.

Americans rely very heavily on oil, and whether or not that is a problem is debatable. We drive everywhere, and enjoy showing off our cars to our friends. We love driving, and there is nothing wrong with that either; we are a mobile society. We like moving around and being in different places. “I drive a small car! It gets 71 MPG!!! I’m special because I'm saving the world!!” 71 miles per gallon of what … air? Political bullshit??! URINE!? No, it’s probably gas.

Let me ask you something: in the last two months, have you driven less? Even a little less. Has the thought, once, crossed your mind in the past sixty days that maybe you should walk your fat ass instead of drive to meet your friends? No, because that’s stupid – it’d take forever for you to get there. They’d be gone by the time you were done walking. How would you carry all your shit from the store to your house? You sure as hell aren’t going to walk a mile to the grocery store every day for just one or two things, you’re going to drive, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We like to stay busy. We like not having enough time to walk to the grocery store or else we would be doing it all the time.

Driving everywhere encourages oil companies to continue to produce what we need to drive. Why would they stop? You would be absolutely furious if they stopped and there was suddenly a shortage of gas for no reason at all. They will not stop producing until we stop purchasing. Producing for Americans is difficult, we want a lot of stuff and we ideally want it for free. That’s not going to happen, but companies are going to give us the next best thing: as cheap as possible.

Yes, sacrifices are going to be made, but we have already agreed that we are ok with those sacrifices. Example: animals are going to die. Our obsession with mobility has always, and will always, continue to kill animals. I wonder which is worse, dying in an oily mess, or being ripped to pieces when a semi truck plows into them. It’s only fair that our aquatic wildlife be subject to the same terms as our land based species. Have you ever looked at the side of a highway? Seriously, drive to Michigan. There was so much death on the road that it quickly turned out to be the worst road trip drinking game ever. As long as there are animals, we will continue to kill them with our vehicles.

This is just one of those things that we can’t do anything about, or else we would have by now. Until you give up driving and eating meat altogether, you really can’t complain about animals dying.

Be sure to check out Part II of this post here.