A Stain on Us All

Reading Psalm 104 tonight:

"How many are your works, O Lord!

In wisdom you made them all;

the earth is full of your creatures.

There is the sea, vast and spacious..."

Nobody knows the purpose of creation, but the joy and exuberance of it are hinted at in the words of this song of praise. All of us must be feeling shame at what's happening tonight in the Gulf of Mexico. A month now, and the oil continues to gush from the well a mile below the surface, now the New York Times is saying at a rate far greater than originally estimated, hundreds of thousands of gallons a day, collecting in thick vertical plumes below the surface, sucking the oxygen out of the water and creating vast dead zones.

I worked after college on a Gulf shrimp boat out of Galveston. I remember the nets coming up out of the water bulging with sea life scraped from the sea bed. I thought that was rape, but this beggars the imagination. Drill, baby, drill. Yeah, right. Think again on that one maybe. It's only fair that this should happen in our waters as we suck up 25 percent of the world's fossil fuels to run everything we do. Even the food we eat is oil. I hope Kerry is able to ram home the climate change bill through the Senate, given the timing. We need to begin to shift now away from fossil fuel dependency. Everything is linked to that, even our soaring health care costs on the back of the obesity epidemic, fed by corn syrup which is again, oil. Junk in, junk out. And the GDP reflects expenditures that are really the death throes of a culture that is only now beginning to realize the extremity of the situation. And there's Rush saying that it's only natural, what's to worry about a few slicked bird feathers.

The brain dead, too, have their place, I suppose, but I'll admit if it had been my creation I would have left the Limbaughs of this world and their followers on the drafting floor.

Photo by Associated Press (Dave Martin)