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