Readers, if you're wondering why you have not yet heard my take on The Great Gulf of Mexico Oil Geyser Disaster Enabled by the Dismantling of Regulations--and Corruption of a Federal Agency With Oil Industry Accomplices From Top to Bottom--by a Certain Ex-Vice President's Secret Energy Task Force, all Fueled (pun fully intended) by This Nation's Insatiable Appetite for Oil That Exists Courtesy of Some of Her Citizens' Stubborn Insistence On Driving Enormous, Wasteful Fucking Cars and SUV's Because Damn it, That's Our Right, God Bless America, well, it's because I have been struggling to find the appropriate words.
I try, and I try once again and always fail, to put into sentences, just a few of them even, how upset I am, particularly upon seeing the oil-coated birds, turtles, and porpoises--the barely alive and the newly dead--upon watching the clogged and dying marshes and mangroves stream across my television and computer, and upon looking at photographs of the distraught faces of fishermen and beach hoteliers whose livelihoods are flat-out destroyed for who knows how many years to come.
I turn to my husband, who loves these shores and those waters, and who, along with my father and brother, has spent countless hours filled with wonder and joy while scuba-diving, filming, and spear-fishing in their rich, life-filled depths, and he tells me how it breaks his heart to think he'll probably never be able to take our sons into the once-vibrant sea that he has enjoyed for the better part of his life; and his eyes fill with tears now as he laments the certain demise of the gentle whale sharks--one of which he clung to and rode like an enormous and dappled underwater pony just a few years ago--as he imagines them swimming through those ghastly plumes of toxic crude and suffocating, and dying horrible, poison-choked deaths, and for what...and you know, I am actually still failing to properly express my outrage.
And for someone who prides herself on being able to wield a strong word or two, normally, that's really saying something.
Also at litbrit.
