In a Time of Oil

As I boarded the train yesterday morning, I caught the front page of another commuter’s Washington Express. There was a large photo of President Obama kneeling down to touch an oil-speckled shoreline. The headline ran “Obama’s Gulf War.” For each generation there is a war, or a cause, or a spirit that fills the background of their lives, occasionally spilling into the foreground and upending the world as they had hoped it would be. Something about the image caught my breath, oil, again, oil defining the time in which I live.

When I was a child, just becoming aware of the world outside my home, messages filtered through the news, my parents, my teachers. There was a hole in the ozone. Global warming was a likely reality. The way we and our parents lived had something to do with it. I learned about carbon dioxide, CFC’s and greenhouse effect. I learned longer words like styrofoam, petroleum, and stratosphere. Headstrong and unaware of the limited measure of my own impact, I leaned on my parents to quit buying aerosol cans. With the help of an extraordinary student teacher, my classmates and I boycotted cafeteria lunches that were packed in styrofoam containers.

Winding our way through middle school, my friends and I learned about first Gulf War, countries in the Middle East, and I heard my father curse the president. It was a war about oil plain and simple, he said. But at school, we talked about the brave troops and wrote cards and letters of support to them.

When one soldier's mission was complete, we greeted him in our classroom with a hero’s welcome. The boys wanted to know about his guns, if he’d ever shot someone. Finding what was certainly among his tamest stories, he told of a night on watch when he and his guard heard footsteps approaching. In the blackness of the desert, someone lurked. They called out, shouting in Arabic and English for the interloper to speak up or stop moving. The steps kept coming, and finally they gave a warning shot. A body dropped. In the morning, they found a camel’s form, torn with bullets.

All I had learned second hand about the war muddled in my mind. Naively, I was mostly horrified about that camel.

I grew older, hearing about gas prices, fearing for the environment, always perplexed by the slow development of our technology. Our Weekly Reader’s had once predicted hover cars and solar panels by the time we reached college. Instead, there was 9/11, conflict with oil-rich countries, a deluge of national skepticism about climate change. There were also Hummers. Wise to the whole scene, I protested the Iraqi invasion and did some conservation work. But I still drove my car and would often go on winding, aimless trips just to clear my head.

Now our own Gulf Coast is absorbing a massive sea of rippling oil spewing from the ocean floor. Environmental devastation the likes of which I’ve never witnessed is washing in its wake. Photos of oil soaked birds and animals prompt the question, what is that? More accurately, what was that? But the response isn’t fast enough.

I think about the other disasters of my adulthood—9/11 and Katrina. People wept openly. Bush was at Ground Zero, and Sean Penn trolled the streets of New Orleans with a shotgun. First responders ran toward disaster, and when response wasn’t fast enough the airwaves were filled with outrage. People died. People were suffering.

Plenty of my greenie friends have bemoaned the spill, BP’s initial two-step around culpability, the toxic mess that is bound to wreak havoc across much of the South and up the coast as summer storms push northward. But when 9/11 happened, people said, “We’re all New Yorkers.” After Katrina, people all over the country opened their homes to evacuees and rescued pets alike. The human toll here is quite different—it includes those who died in the initial explosion, those whose livelihoods may be lost for years or more, but the iconic images somehow aren’t as staggering. People see what looks like Freddy Krueger’s lost pet pelican, and say, “Oh, how awful,” but don’t often pack a bag—because we’re not sure where to go or what to do once we get there.

I’ve been a supporter of President Obama since he was first running for Senate back in Illinois, but with this crisis, he’s coming close to losing me. I’m not sure what enough is in this case, but he’s not doing it. Generations before me had their wars and defining moments. Gen Xers and Millennials have been shaped by (among other things) computers, shop-happy Boomer parents, the Simpsons and oil. Always oil. As a kid, I felt as though I could do something to save the planet—even something small like cutting out styrofoam cups would do—and now, I wonder what activity on my part would be enough. Most people I know feel the same way, but instead, again, we are merely witnesses as the oil spreads, and again stains our lives.

In the president’s speech earlier this week, he said, “what has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny – our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there. We know we’ll get there.” But in this case, it’s not as though the mere details of the goal are still being sorted out; it’s utterly ill-defined. As examples, the president referred to building enough planes and tanks for World War II and, later, landing a man on the moon. In both of those cases, a president made a cause the nation’s cause and asked the country to get to work.

Strangely, I find myself in much the same situation as when I was a kid in school, expecting to follow my teacher’s lead. She explained environmental hazards and what we could do to help, and so we in turn did our part. That’s what teachers do—they teach. I don’t expect the president to tell me where to donate or suggest that I volunteer. I’m waiting for this president to do what the great presidents have done—imagine a new spirit for the nation, the way forward, and call us all to contribute. That’s how presidents lead.