Accountability

As much as I want to write here every day, sometimes it just doesn’t happen.

Some days I get busy with other things. Other times, there just doesn’t seem to be anything that grabs my interest and rouses my righteous indignation (which I tend to have in abundance).

Righteous indignation can be exhausting at times. I try not to waste the effort if I can help it.

Sometimes, the news is just too depressing and I can’t think of a way to spin the topic to find any different way to look at it, or some glimmer of hope out of a situation.

After all, everyone gets all the real news they need either on the television or from the internet. I’ve never claimed even the most minimal of journalistic credentials.

For example, the deep water oil well that is spewing toxins into the Gulf of Mexico has been the headline story for close to a month now.

Nothin’ funny there, as hard as I’ve tried. Generations from now our descendants will curse the stupidity of their forefathers, especially when we should have known better.

This is even more stupid than the person who introduced Kudzu into the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu

This is an “OH, CRAP” that can’t be remedied. The entire world is on this roller coaster and there’s no way to get off before the ride ends. All of us are going on a trip whether we like it or not. While it may not directly impact those of us alive today, we have no way of knowing how it will impact our grandchildren and beyond.

The problem with this situation is that the pimply faced teenager who’s sadistically running the controls on the ride in this case is a middle aged man with a British accent who can’t even claim the ignorance of youth.

He, and those who worked with him to disregard safety features, shore up junk science for purely economic motives and who are directly responsible for this fiasco deserve a special place in the deepest depths of Hell for their environmental sins.

That group includes a fair number of government regulators AND LEGISLATORS who allowed their wallet to do their thinking and weren’t paying attention to what was going on and safeguarding the public interest like they should have been.

And maybe, although not to quite the same extent, it includes all of us who climb into our oversized cars multiple times in a day and don’t plan our trips to minimize miles driven.

It includes those who oppose the creation of light rail systems and other forms of mass transit because it might inconvenience us temporarily.

And it includes those of us who use vehicles unnecessarily, like the mom’s who can’t let go long enough to put their children on the bus to ride to school, so they have to make the twice daily trips across town to pick them up and drop them off.

It also includes the high school students (and their parents) who allow the kids to drive to school when there’s no legitimate reason for doing so, just because it’s “cool” to have your car at school.

Call me radical, but you only have to drive by any local high school to see a parking lot that looks like a mall lot on Black Friday (another travesty for which City Planners should be held accountable) with swarms of vehicles of every size and color.

I firmly believe that if we (a) raised the absolute driving age to 18 (a permit at 16 with a licensed driver over 21 – or maybe 25) and (b) eliminated parking lots at high schools we could significantly diminish oil consumption and air quality issues in a lot of places.

We could just charge for parking permits at schools, but that favors the rich kids over those that are less affluent which doesn’t seem right.

Another way to cut down on the number of drivers? Mandatory study hall at the end of the day – if you ride the bus, bicycle or walk, you get out an hour ahead of those who drive private cars. After that, drivers are released alphabetically on a rotating schedule ten minutes apart, so that everyone doesn’t race for the parking lot at once.

We’d cut down on the number of cars being driven as well as the number of accidents that occur when inexperienced drivers are plunged into a hormone laden traffic jam.

And, before the angry emails start, I include our family in that group of sinners above and realize that the suggestion wouldn’t be popular on the home front.

It’s not likely to be implemented anyhow, given the economic interest in keeping all those cars on the road and working.

And in the meantime, we have a hole in the earth that continues to spew somewhere between 5,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil a day into the environment (either nobody is sure or no one will answer) where the plants and animals can’t complain, but merely suffer in silence other than their death cries, wondering why their eggs won’t hatch or their mate doesn’t return, and why they can’t fly or swim or breath with this black gunk all over them.

And we humans are either without the desire or the ability to stop the destruction that they’ve wrought.

Can’t spin that one cheerful, no matter how hard I try. I was wrong about the righteous indignation, though. It’s right there, ready to spew out just like the oil.