America gets everything it wants. It wants oil, and for its sins, it’s getting oil. 70,000 barrels a day of it, coming ashore on the Gulf Coast with more on the way, flowing like black blood from that gaping wound in the earth, ripped a mile deep by the weapons of greed, held in the hands of stormtroopers of profit, nothing can stop it, no one can staunch it, that black blood will keep spilling all over our shores, through the loop current out into the Gulf Stream, up the East Coast and across the Atlantic, written on the waves like a message from Hell.
Tell me no more of your plans to control this, tell me no more of your feeble response, the sea will not hear you, the tide will not heed you, the poison is spreading above and below. Our fate has been written in carbon emissions, in ozone depletion and polar cap melting, in black bloodstains of horror on the face of the deep.
The devastation unleashed by BP/Transocean/Halliburton is already orders of magnitude worse than Katrina and there’s no end in sight. A billion words have been written about this disaster, but the enormity of it is beyond words, only two words come even close to describing it . . .
Corporate greed and political corruption have triggered this catastrophe in the Gulf, there is endless suffering ahead and no way to avoid it . . .
These are people used to surviving disaster. It seemed there was nothing they couldn’t handle. Until this spill. Oysterman Buck Battle, who lost his house to Katrina, calls the oil spill “the monster of monsters.”
“I’ve never heard so much fear in people’s voices,” says Mike Tidwell, author of “Bayou Farewell,” which chronicled southern Louisiana’s long legacy of environmental problems. “A hurricane is an event with a beginning, a middle and an end. This is more like a nuclear accident offshore and a radiation cloud is coming in. There’s a sense of doom.”