The gulf blowout

I don't write much about current events, but the gulf oil blowout has been on my mind a lot. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it.

This will end up being a typical USA deal. By which I mean ten years from now, the gulf will be dead, along with the Caribbean and a large part of the Atlantic. Beaches along the gulf coast will be abandoned. Hurricanes will have carried oil inland, and coastal cities will slowly dwindle in size. Cities from Mobile to Tampa will look like Detroit and New Orleans. There will be occasional news dispatches promising progress soon, and we will have heard the promises so many times by then we won't have the emotional energy left to be outraged by the obvious lies.

It's the environmental equivalent of Afghanistan or Vietnam.

BP will get taxpayer bailouts, change its name, and walk away unscathed.

Part of what disgusts and depresses me about this is knowing that if some manmade disaster happens where I live, the result will be the same. Swarms of personnel will swoop in to make sure no pictures are taken of it. The government will send the perpetrators sternly-worded letters. Michael Bloomberg will urge us to protect our royal CEO class.

And the rest of us will just be fucked.

I'm not getting out of bed today.