The Gulf Oil Spill

Here is an interesting article with much to say about it. It is from an AP article on Breitbart.com

Modern meets primeval in Gulf oil spill response

By CALVIN WOODWARD

It's all so last millennium, that filthy business in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico.

It reeks of yesterday's fuel, yesterday's sweaty labor—a hands-on way of life from another time. Today's Americans don't care to know how the gas comes to the pump, the food to the table, the iPad to the store.

Just make sure they do. ....

......The United States is a seafaring nation whose encounters with the sea now tend to be Red Lobster in the suburbs or Memorial Day at the beach.

It's historically a farming, industrial and exploring nation, most of whose people now are distant from the elemental struggles of living and working in the physical environment, much less understanding it.

Only 14 percent of the modern U.S. work force is engaged in production: manufacturing, mining, logging, construction and the like. The rest are in services.

While it is often considered an alien place, too, Washington is a product of that nation.

The president and many lawmakers are lawyers by training, not engineers, roustabouts or farmers. No wonder members of Congress met to discuss legal liability among their first orders of business in the oil spill response. For many in Washington, the talk is of blame, accountability and political consequences.

No wonder, perhaps, that President Barack Obama assumed that something so terrible would not happen because it had not happened before.

Like most Americans, he lacks the sixth sense of a mariner in foul weather or a miner listening to the earth speak.

He does, though, hail from Hawaii, where, as he noted last week, the ocean is sacred. Not to mention, all around.

A lot more in the article, read it here.