Black Death, Reloaded

Consider the following, my readers. Suppose you're driving while texting, a seemingly innocuous action. In the course of your distraction, you drive over a curb into a crowd of people downtown, killing 11 of them and causing substantial damage to the downtown area. The odds are fantastic, if not 100%, that you will be spending the rest of your life (or at least a very large part of it) in prison and paying restitution to the families of those whose relatives you killed.

Now, consider the following: An enormous oil rig, mostly out of commission, lacks the modern safety equipment necessary to prevent a catastrophic leak. The company chooses not to outfit it with said equipment because it would cost an extra $500,000 (note: said company made over $4 billion in profits in the fourth quarter of 2009 alone) and the government, loaded at the time (and even now) with corporate cronies and former members of said company, makes compliance with international standards voluntary. These failures all come back to bite everyone related in the ass when a trapped methane bubble causes a massive explosion, rupturing the oil main and opening a geyser into the Gulf of Mexico.

The costs: 11 dead oil workers. Millions upon millions of dollars lost to federal cleanup efforts, which to this point have been largely unsuccessful. A devastated ecosystem the likes of which we've never seen. Entire local industries decimated. Tens of thousands of Americans facing unemployment through no fault of their own. Sounds a little bit worse than the first situation, right?

So what does the company responsible for this catastrophe stand to lose? $75 million, plus the cost of cleanup. That's it. For comparison's sake, based on their profits from the last year, BP could pay the entire cost of the cleanup, plus their meager oil pollution fine, with the money made in roughly a week. How is this possible? Are we really OK with letting this happen? Think about what's happened here: through sheer negligence, BP has wounded the Earth. It has killed, murdered if you will, eleven innocent people. It has contaminated a vibrant ecosystem beyond anything we've known (this makes the Exxon Valdez look like someone tipped over a teacup). It has compounded the problem by using chemical dispersants to ensure that the oil slick looks less serious when photographed from above, ocean life be damned. For the record, while these dispersants allow the oil to be broken down over thousands of years by microscopic bacteria, they're toxic to phytoplankton, which are the bottom rung on nearly every marine food chain. With the base of the food chain gone, there's nothing left for the next highest group to survive on. Slowly, tortuously, everything dies. No life means no fishing industry, so in turn it has obliterated a major local industry, costing the cash-strapped South billions and putting thousands out of work. It has wrecked the local tourism industries as well, with some businesses reporting enormous losses as travelers stay away from the ever-growing toxin lake. It has downplayed the ultimate impact of the disaster, even as scientists begin to warn that the oil threatens to move into strong ocean currents and pose a threat to the coasts of Florida and Texas, with some possibility it could even begin to reach the East Coast.

We cannot stand by and let them get away with this. This is no oil spill; this is a cataclysm. This is devastation on an unimagined scale. This is the end of the Gulf of Mexico; for decades, barring any sort of immediate intervention and drastic change of course, the Gulf will be a dead zone. This is an economic massacre; BP ultimately loses nothing, save maybe some public stature, while whole states face untold ruin. To watch BP, Halliburton (that's right, our good friends are also responsible for upkeep on this rig) and Transocean Limited ignore the scale of this problem while pointing fingers at one another makes me physically ill.

As you might have guessed from my anger, I've got something of a personal stake in this. I've only seen the ocean once. It was on a spring break while I was in high school, and it was the Gulf of Mexico, from the Port of New Orleans. Much as watching a city I came to love drown hurt me personally, watching these waters, teeming with unique and magnificent life, wither and die as the blackness spreads makes me ache. I'm tired of watching my country let parts of itself die. No more. The time has come to speak out. Tell your congressman that this mockery of justice cannot and must not stand. Tell your attorney general that these companies must be held accountable for their failures in criminal court, that someone must pay for these tragic, inconceivable crimes. Tell your president that the time for cowering in the face of corporate power is over. Tell your country that, in the words of Peter Finch in Network, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

My planet bleeds. I do not accept this wave of death. I do not accept this crime. Until next time, do not accept anything less than justice.

Children, Children, Future, Future

It's a pretty rare occasion when the far left and the far right agree on something. Typically, the two sides only agree completely when the situation is so black-and-white that literally nothing could lead to disagreement (the obvious example being things like Pearl Harbor). Hence my surprise at the growing accord between the two sides regarding a number of issues, including one which recently reached the Supreme Court. For completion's sake, I'll run down the four I'm thinking of; see if you can guess the common link between the four.

1. Santa Clara County in California has banned the sale of fast food meals that "pander to children."

2. Corporate Accountability International is demanding that McDonald's eliminate their use of terrifying demonspawn (or, to use a term many of you may find more fitting, clown) Ronald McDonald as a mascot, calling him "a deep-fried 21st century Joe Camel."

3. Increasingly, parents are refusing to have their children vaccinated, claiming that the injections are dangerous. Still others refuse because they believe, despite numerous studies to the contrary, that the preservatives in vaccines lead to autism (I've got major issues with the attention given autism these days, but that's another story for another time).

4. The Supreme Court agreed to hear a case regarding overturning a lower court's own overturning of a California law banning the sale and rental of violent video games to minors.

The answer, for those of you who saw all the links, remembered my column on "our hyperradical president" and immediately said "tl;dr," is that all of these are examples of legislators pursuing agendas that propose removing responsibility for children from their parents. In essence, legislators are trying to force the state to play nanny, and many parents are all too willing to hop on board for the supposedly altruistic reason of "protecting our children." The far left views this as eliminating unseemly aspects of modern society (particularly childhood obesity and violence anywhere), while the far right can get past the "big government" issues because these issues fall in line with their (mostly) fundamentalist Christian dogma.

Man, it just figures that when you finally get them to agree on something, they're wrong, doesn't it?

These examples are really a continuation of a trend we've seen since the early 90's: reducing the responsibility of parents for the behavior of their children. Heck, if you want to toss the mass overdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder in with the others, feel free, it'd be fitting. More and more, parents are deciding that raising their children properly is just too hard, so rather than amp up their level of commitment, they seek other ways to absolve them of their own failures. Consider the vaccination issue. In spite of overwhelming physical evidence that proves beyond any doubt that the use of vaccines has drastically reduced childhood mortality and even eradicated certain diseases (smallpox is completely gone, polio no longer present in North America, tuberculosis fairly rare), parents would rather take a chance with their child's health. They claim they're "looking out for their babies," but who they're really looking out for is Number 1. If the kid gets something, then they can make the argument that someone else gave it to the child, thus making it this other ill person's fault. Some will counter with the claim that this is the perfect example of taking total responsibility for their children because they're taking responsibility for any future vulnerability to diseases. To that, I counter that in doing so they are abandoning their responsibility to society to prevent the possible spread of potentially fatal diseases. There are studies currently ongoing that show the lack of vaccination, in conjunction with the increasing number of drug-resistant strains, is beginning to allow certain major childhood diseases to return (the measles, in particular, has returned with disturbing force). In this instance, abdicating your responsibility to cover your ass is only putting the rest of ours at risk.

The irresponsibility doesn't stop there. The two McDonald's-targeted challenges are ostensibly meant to curb the spread of childhood obesity, which is a decent goal. The issue, though, is that last I checked, kids don't buy their own food (most of the time). If I wanted a Happy Meal toy back in the day and my parents weren't interested in going to McDonald's, you know what they did? THEY SAID NO. I know that's a foreign concept to many parents today, but it's what needs to be done. In general, children who don't eat fast food on a daily basis don't typically become obese from fast food. Again, odd concept, I know. At no time should anyone pretend they don't know what they're getting into with fast food. I understand with kids, because at that age many don't read particularly well (another issue for another time) and even fewer would understand a nutrition chart if it smacked them in the face. I don't expect them to know the health risks they face from eating that stuff all the time, but for their parents to pretend that it isn't their responsibility to know what's in their kids' food smacks of laziness, apathy, and an unwillingness to take responsibility for their own decisions. The same is true of the push to eliminate Ronald McDonald. The comparison to Joe Camel is erroneous because Joe Camel pandered to minors a substance they could not legally use, a substance with known addictive chemicals present to ensure their continued use. If a child decides "Screw you, I'm gonna have a burger," there's no real concern that the child will become physically dependent on hamburgers for the rest of his or her life. Above all else, though, it's a matter of having a spine. The child is not the one making the decisions. As such, the child's predilection to follow the wishes of a mephitic burger jester shouldn't come into play. If you're pathetic enough that a charlatan in a yellow jumper has more influence over what your child eats than you do, then you might as well just give your kids to Angelina.

The last one, regarding violent video games, really bothers me for a number of reasons. I know a fellow who started playing violent things like Mortal Kombat back in grade school and has continued with it up to this day. He's never had any issues with violence or anger. He graduated at the top of his class in high school, graduated with honors from a respected university, and today is a respected professional with a steady job and fiscal independence. I know this fellow pretty well, because this fellow is me. I've never had an issue with it because from an early age, I could tell the difference between a game and reality. Moreover, my parents understood that I understood the difference, so they permitted me that leeway. To put this simply, if a parent doesn't believe their child can play these sorts of things without reenacting them (in other words, that the child can't tell what's acceptable in real life and what's not), there should be absolutely no way the parent permits the child to play them. There's not even a good excuse for not knowing what games could pose a problem, because THERE'S A RATING SYSTEM. THE ANSWERS ARE ALREADY ON THE DAMN BOX. If parents would just do some research and look at the box, they could be well-informed on what their child could be witnessing and make their decisions based on that. It reminds me of the parents who go to Blockbuster, see the cartoon pictures on the box, rent Urotsukidoji for their kids, and come back furious over what was in it (if you're curious, Google it...there's no way in hell I'm linking anything on that). There's a certain level of responsibility that goes into these sorts of things, and if you're going to duck that responsibility, you deserve the consequences.

You might have noticed I keep using the word "responsibility." That's because that's what all this comes back to: responsibility, and an unwillingness to accept it. There are certain things that a parent needs to know to make informed decisions. For some reason, there's a distinct lack of interest in learning those necessary things; I'm tempted to call it "willful ignorance." Instead, the prevailing thought has become "Let's force everyone to play by a set of rules because we don't have the stones to make our own." That disturbs me, as it should disturb anyone who respects the notion of a free, well-educated society. When did we stop forcing people to own up to their mistakes? When did we decide parenting was the government's job? When did we decide that individual responsibility is irrelevant when it comes to progeny? Why haven't we fixed that? It's time to face facts: if there's something wrong with your child, the first person you should even consider blaming is the person in the mirror. Until next time, whenever someone says "Won't someone pleeeeeease think of the children?", respond with these two little words:

You first.