Category Archives: 2001-present

That was clear from class today.

A friend of mine just brought up the oil spill to me again on the phone, and he was too young to remember the Iranian hostage crisis. We are living through a terrible moment in history right now, and this isn’t a moment where you “remember where you were when…” like one day you will tell someone younger than you where you were the day Barack Obama was elected President. That was a great day. Your grandparents remember where they were when they found out that John F. Kennedy had been killed. That was a horrible day.

Every single day during the Iranian hostage crisis, I came home from school hoping upon hope that my mom would tell me the hostages were freed. I remember getting the newspaper and hoping that there would be something happy there to find out about these poor people. The newspaper was Newsday, and it was an “evening” paper – so there was never going to be anything new in that paper that I didn’t already know. This went on for 1 year and almost 100 more days… it was torture to be an American citizen in 1980 because some Iranian college students made fools of us and we had a President who wouldn’t stand up for us. OK it wasn’t really torture, but it was deeply and thoroughly humiliating. I do not use these words lightly. I feel this same sense of humiliation again when I see these corporate executives on TV each morning, and I hear reported the effing jerk CEO of BP say he’d like his life back. Really? Like “Seth and Amy? Really?” really?

What we are living through now is an enduring and sustained horribleness. The world is being polluted – no, destroyed, before our eyes, while we watch – and we are powerless to stop it right this instant. By “we” I mean you, me, the President, scientists: by we, I mean all the people of the planet Earth. And men who make more money in a month than we will make in a lifetime sit on morning TV and act like snotty children who you want to just smack upside the head. If you’re lucky enough to be crazy busy, you can avoid the news. If you’re not, you try to figure out how to expel the sadness from your body because it’s so sad but it’s hard to cry for an oil soaked pelican. We couldn’t see those hostages all that time, but is the sadness different or is it my soul that is so hardened by a country so stupid as to elect the leaders that they do?

So we’re living through this event. People, animals, economies, systems of all types are going to be screwed over by this event. It won’t just end and we look back and see houses built a year later. We’re not going to grow a bunch new fish on the Today show and ship them in a big truck to New Orleans (they built house frames in Rockefeller Center and shipped them to La.) Whether or not you believe in a higher power, how did they ever think they were going to just rebuild biology? How did they think they allow the possibility of this happening and how do they think they can ever, ever possibly make amends to all of the Earth’s creatures for what they have done?

My friend Chris is a video guru of sorts and he made this video because he felt he needed to do something.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-zxJRzQo48