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When I see the pelicans covered in goop and each dying alone, with no living creature to comfort them, I realize that Louisiana chose its state bird wisely. For the pelican is an old symbol of protection. But the protection that ought to be there for the people, the land and the wildlife has been clogged with the gunk of greed, negligence and spin.
The images of ruined marshes, tar-balled beaches, oil-soaked fish and birds, strangling and starving, are dramatic and heartrending. Just as dramatic and heartrending, though, are the pictures you don't see: lives ruined and livelihoods suffocated. The despairing anger and desperate defiance we survived Katrina and we'll survive this rarely make the national news.
But it's there, on the local talk shows, where each voice echoes the frustration of the previous caller. It's there in the stories in the local papers, stories you can read online.
"Oil Spill in Brief," a now daily feature of New Orleans' The Times-Picayune, announces, "St. Bernard Parish will sponsor a food giveaway Tuesday for needy families, especially those damaged by fallout from the BP oil spill." Another item informs locals that two open house expos in Plaque-mines Parish, where oil gushes up to the shoreline every day and local business owners worry about bankruptcy, will be attended by "representatives from BP, the Coast Guard, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, the Environmental Protection Agency and other (government agencies)."
BP says it takes full responsibility and assures us they will pay for it all. Yet BP has hired a flock of ad gurus cutting video ads, TV spots and full-page color ads spending thousands in a media blitz as slick, and oily and sickening, as the spill itself.
BP, a whitewash won't work.
This has become President Obama's 3 a.m. call on top of everything else sitting urgently on his desk: an economy still ailing from a deep recession, two wars, Iran still hell bent on possessing its own nuclear arsenal, North Korea being North Korea, etc.
And the president, while coordinating the clamor of state and local officials ideas, supplies, support: every request urgent, every response demanded immediately must still continue to press BP to cap, contain, clean up and compensate the people of the Gulf Coast.
The oil spill, it seems, offers an invaluable lesson to Americans: Some problems are not subject to quick fixes.
Of course President Obama and Congress, working together, must repair the laws regulating energy businesses.
This is a teachable moment. It is time to alter expectations and attitudes. It is time for Congress, state and local officials to focus on dialogue, not diatribe. It is time to compromise for the common good, not grandstand for partisan gain. It is time, though we will remain dependent on oil for decades, to enter a nationwide rehab on our addiction to oil. We need to develop a comprehensive energy policy, moving toward alternate, renewable sources and away from our addiction to oil.
Let us learn this, the biggest lesson of the national catastrophe.
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