I heard on the radio - on 'This American Life' (Episode: 'Island Time'), a feature about relief efforts in Haiti. And it was all about our focus in fixing things quickly versus the local's slow, convoluted, 'evolutionary' way of getting things done.
Apparently, our patience is thin when it comes to waiting for hospitals to be built, and getting people the treatment they need to survive. Which is understandable, the story revealed, but counterproductive in the long term. Our desire to move quickly leads us to push the local people out of the picture. They become followers to our commands, and not in control of their own destiny.
This state of affairs gets needed things done, but never provides the structure for a self-reliant future. Some relief workers in Haiti were voicing the opinion that it might be tragic, but necessary, to let the locals manage the process. Some people will suffer or die needlessly, in exchange for a better Haitian future.
A tough trade-off, and not one that all foreign relief workers can accept. And specifically not American relief workers.
If Americans see a problem we can fix, or we think should be quickly fixed, we want and expect it to be done now.
Which is why our collective growing frustration with British Petroleum (BP) over the Gulf Oil Spill is no surprise.
There's a hole. Plug It.
There's a leak. Stop It.
There's a Spill. Clean it Up.
We can't seem to fathom why these things can't be done. And quickly.
But I guess we'll have to take a tip from the more progressive Haitian relief workers and let the locals handle their own affairs. If we don't let BP figure it out for themselves, they'll never get better. And isn't that a future worth a few extinct species and a decade or so of oil blobs and collapsed fisheries?
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So the President gets strung along by a British company that does not care about killing American workers, in Texas or the Gulf.
And the American people get fed a poisonous 30-year diet of "The Government Can't Do Anything Right", so they willingly choke off the funds to make sure every catastrophe results in a hands-up-in-the-air failure.
So the Oilers and the Shimpers and the President and the Mexicans and the Caribbean and all of America are going to have to wait to 'til the only people -BP - get the deal done. Because they said they had plans to protect the environment, including the walruses of Louisiana. They promised to not let it happen and to make it right it did.
I say when the gusher gets plugged we NATIONALIZE British Petroleum's holdings and operations in the US as punishment for serial negligence, and operate them slowly and safely and sell the products at cost to Americans only.
All Americans should have access to American oil products at reasonable cost even if that cost is $6.00 per gallon. That is the way to energy independence.
BP, at it's gas stations on the East Coast, advertises a gasoline additive it calls 'invigorate', as in '...now with invigorate!'. A puzzling throwback to 1960's advertising, the add's become maddening since the spill.
It's only a matter of time before someone decides to edit this to 'infuriate'.
So very cheesy - Like something pipe-dreamed by Zappa. Seems to my the POS signs would lend themselves to some fine guerilla counter-marketing...
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