I’ve been kinda down lately. There’s nothing optimistic about what’s been buzzing in my ears recently and humming incessantly inside my head, like an ongoing droning sounds of a dryer. I want this humming to stop so I thought I’d try the ranting therapy. I normally don’t rant – especially on weekends. Mind you, I’m a hopeless, eternal optimist. Ask my hubby. But I feel like I have to let out some steam today.
Warning: I am not responsible for any accidental or intentional profanity spills (or gushing) during this session due to failure to control any reflexes and effects the world news may have in my frontal cortex or my amygdala.
Erupting Volcano in Iceland
On March 31st, Obama made the disturbing and shocking (or maybe not so surprising since he is a politician after all) announcement that he is lifting the ban on offshore oil drilling along the East Coast from Delaware to Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. Really? Just one hundred mile away from the pristine beaches where my family vacation and where sensitive and delicate marine life sanctuaries are located? I worried, innocently, at the time, “What if there is an oil spill, like the Exxon Valdez, ….100 miles away from the beaches?”
And even before my jumpy and emotional mouthing-off subsided, twenty nine miners in West Virginia died in a coal mine explosion on April 6th. Obama and Biden attended the funeral for that disaster and demanded an answer, how this could happen. OMG…..what do you mean, how this could happen?? Do you have to ask that question? How about if DO NOT use fossil fuels and DO NOT dig mines for coal?
My mind was starting to boil beyond words now.
Then, on April 20th, less than a month after Obama made the grim announcement that he’s lifting the ban on offshore drilling, Deepwater Horizon explosion occurred, an oil rig owned by British Petroleum and it sank in the Gulf of Mexico, as if God was speaking loud and clear, “Don’t f*** with me!” or “You are effed!”. Since then, more than four million gallons of oil have been, not just leaking or spilling, but GUSHING into the Gulf.
Yeah, we are effed!
Never mind the eleven missing lives when the rig went down, presumably dead, and scores of injured workers but the potential economic devastation in the already depressed and barely recovering (from Katrina) fishermen in the neighboring states is just too saddening. And how about the innocent marine animals? How will we rescue them from our stupidity?
There are already signs of distressed, oil slicked animals as result of the oil spilling, gushing into the ocean. They tried to put dispersants in the water to disperse the oil but the chemicals in the dispersants are just as toxic to marine life as the oil. And what if all it’s doing is breaking up the oil into billions of pieces and killing off marine life underneath the ocean where we can’t see the oil slick?
There was a glimmer of hope last week when I heard that Cape Wind’s Wind Farm project was approved but then, that little optimism and hope were dashed when I read that opponents are claiming constitutional violation to oppose the wind farm being built, stating that it will be too expensive. Don’t they read the news? Do they prefer hundreds of oil rigs in the Cape? Don’t they understand that alternative energy is the only answer? How stupid and short sighted are we? Or damn selfish? Or all of the above?
I am no longer angry. I am clinically depressed now.
