PURGE: it's not that I've not been thinking about this blog . . . .

. . . I have.

Sometimes I think I've set a precedent for myself,

to perform at a certain level,

and it's just so hard this week;

I'm just so tired.

And I'm frustrated by the events of the world.

It all just seems so stupid.

This ongoing oil spill. . . . .

OK, so I was wrong:

it's not the worst

oil spill the world has ever seen,

not yet at least.

Still

what makes it horrifying is how it has become

a spectator sport.

The number of films on YouTube alone

of the spill is horrifying.

Here's a link to a page with 

all the live feeds, which people seem to find

intriguing:

bplivefeeds

People just seem to be taken by the practice of just gazing upon 

the plumes of oil,

spewing up out of the sea bottom

uncontrollably.

I know it's an odd comparison, but it's almost like watching

a woman menstruating --

seeing the blood pouring out, uncontrollably,

knowing the belly is aching with the pangs of a birth that might have been,

but instead all that's left is waste,

spewing forth in an uncontrollable deluge.

The only difference is that this bloodletting

was not natural; no;

it was imposed

by humans.

But still, I can feel the earth's pangs of pain.

2.

We have truly raped the earth

as we've depleted her resources

unnaturally;

I parallel it a bit with the ways

we have mistreated animals

through the process of domestication.

Visit my cat blog;

there are three entries

on the story of my Turkish cat

(who just puked a strange green bile on my carpet).

She is old now, and deaf;

when I first got her, in Turkey,
she was neither old nor deaf.

I wanted her spayed.

It took three operations

to do it,

and she lost her hearing along with her ovaries.

It was an incompetent veterinarian who at one point
simply took something out of her gut
and told me "I think I got it," meaning her ovary.
He was wrong; she needed another operation after that.

So when she has symptoms like
green puke now,
in her later years, I still wonder
what he took out in that
second operation.
He did not know.

She has suffered so much

simply because

I wanted her to meet my specifications

in order for her to live in my house.

As if I was actually capable of reading her mind about that subject:
who knows if she really wanted to live in my house?

3.

Speaking of Turkey,

what about the Freedom Flotilla?

I've posted the

Christian Science Monitor's coverage in the entry
below this entry.

I may sound simplistic,

but it's time we stop fighting.

Especially across religious lines.

It is time we stop 

feeling that one group has more right than another

over a piece of this earth.

Israel.

Palestine.

Asia Minor.

Cyprus.

Yugoslavia.

Iraq.

Iran.

. . . .

The list goes on and on:

tormented land,

land that blood has shed upon

because one group of humans

felt they had more of a right to posses that little plot

of earth
than another group,

when in fact,

in their very deaths,

interred as we are

into the ground, 

we can see oh so clearly

that it is not we

who own the earth

but the earth

that owns us,
always will and always has.

Perhaps the most civil news story
I heard  today
was an apology delivered
from a 30 year veteran referee
to a newly minted professional baseball pitcher:

(see the Christian Science Monitor's

"Photos of the Day"

for June 3 )

If only world leaders
could find it within themselves
to admit potential misjudgements,
to shake hands and move on
to the next game
in the spirit of true sportsmanship.

The Third Gulf War, this one in the Gulf of Mexico

The First Gulf War:

1990: Iraq invades Kuwait.  The reasons are many, though a large one was territory.  In 1991, this led to an invasion of Iraq, by U.S. troupes, under the leadership of George H. W. Bush.

You can be sure that oil was an element; in fact, Iraq deliberately spilled oil into the Persian Gulf,

creating what has been considered the largest oil spill in history.  That is, until now.

The Second Gulf War (aka: the Iraq War)

1993 - present: the USA, with a small international coalition, invades Iraq, allegedly because it harbors "weapons of mass destruction."  Many Americans believed that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis had something to do with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 2001.  I'm not going to say too much more about this, though oh, so much could be said.  My link is to the Wikipedia entry on this ongoing war and hundreds of thousands of lives that it claimed.  If you go to the link, please go down to the section titled "Iraq awards oil contracts," where it briefly discusses how, in 2009, "the Iraqi ministry of oil awarded contracts to international oil companies for some of Iraq's many oil fields."


And now, we have:

The Third Gulf War:

 
April 20, 2010: an oil well blow out causes a catastrophic explosion at an oil rig located in the Gulf of Mexico, 40 miles South of Louisiana.  As you can see from my link, we already have a Wikipedia entry on this catastrophic disaster.  

On April 30, as this Al Jazeera story shows, President Barack Obama proposed the possibility of sending the military to "combat" this increasing enemy blob in the Gulf:

 

On May 5, the Russian Times made this rather extraordinary suggestion:

British Petroleum's ominously named "Top Kill" effort has turned out to be quite a disaster:

And U.S. citizens and politicians are taking sides as to whether or not this is the President's fault.

Let's face it: the wars over oil 

have moved right into the U.S.'s own beloved gulf,

and while we bicker over partisan positions,
that precious black gold

is spilling out, polluting the sea environment at rapid speeds.

Can't The Oil Industry, and the American people see: this may be the 

most treachourous Gulf War yet, and it's terribly ironic to me that, even
with our national demand for cheap oil,
we're watching while this bleeds into the Gulf of Mexico,
arguing about whether or not the government should take care of it,
taking polls on YouTube about whose fault it is.

Perhaps we're all to blame,
with hoggish demand for this
precious resource,
and our insistence that we
pay so much less for it than the rest of the world.

There's a strange case of kismet here:
we've fought some
horrible wars
over oil;
we're absolute slaves to it.
but we can't seem to
contain its hemmorhaging
into the sea just South of our own national shores.