Coutland Milloy has an interesting take on our inability to stop the oil leak in the gulf. He argues that in our desire to hold someone accountable for this disaster we are failing to hold our selves accountable, that our expecations of what is possible are completely out of sync with reality, and that our inability to fix the leak is also, partially, caused by our own misplaced priorities:
When it comes to oil, we seem to be stuck in some infantile stage where it's okay to suckle on the gas pump till the well runs dry. We don't care where the oil comes from, and we'll do anything to get it. Boycott BP? You've got to be kidding. Our appetite is insatiable, and now that gorging has got us in trouble we want Obama to burp us and jump-start our sense of outrage.
Outrage at anybody other than ourselves, of course.
Listen to how incessantly we complain about nobody coming to our rescue. Conditioned by disaster movies to have heroes show up within 90 minutes or so, we are beside ourselves that 44 days have passed and oil is still gushing into the gulf. At this rate, with no end to the leakage expected before August, what is already the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history could come to be regarded as the American Chernobyl, with consequences lasting well into the next century.
The boomers can express faux indignation: If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we fix a busted oil pipe? Could the answer be that we have become a generation of slackers in science and math that grown-ups have been warning about for decades? Can our generation even field a team of engineers smart enough to cap the well -- or do we have to call the help line in India for that, too?
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