Drill baby, drill.

It has to be a real pisser to be sitting around your office, doing whatever, when the phone rings and you're told that millions of gallons of oil are spilling into the Gulf of Mexico with no end in sight.

The plan: to lower 74-ton, concrete-and-metal boxes into the gulf to capture the oil and siphon it to a barge waiting at the surface. Whether that will work for a leak 5,000 feet below the surface is anyone's guess; the method has previously worked only in shallower waters.
If it doesn't, and efforts to activate a shutoff mechanism called a blowout preventer continue to prove fruitless, the oil probably will keep gushing for months until a second well can be dug to cut off the first. Oil giant BP PLC's latest plan will take six to eight days because welders have to assemble the boxes.

I realize that the world runs on oil, but I wonder if the risk of drilling for it so close to land is worth what we get out. Even President Obama has given his official "okey-dokey" to more offshore drilling. It just seems to me to be so short-sighted. Especially when you consider the upheaval that occurs when someone wants to put a wind farm offshore. Local residents complain that they will be able to see the wind turbines from their homes. Pity. At least, when a wind turbine stops working, all it does is stop spinning. It doesn't spew toxic waste into the water. That's a plus, as far as I'm concerned.

Meanwhile, the well cannot be capped and the oil keeps spewing. It isn't like your car, where a rattle can be hidden by turning the radio up. There isn't a radio that can go that loud.

When John Kerry ran for president in 2000, the reason I voted for him was that he wanted to initiate an "Apollo Project" to try to get us off the oil standard. Like the moon landing, he figured (correctly, I assumed) that if we threw money at it and assigned our best brainpower to the problem, we could escape the grip of oil and figure out how to run things on stuff like solar, wind and other things that we don't have to dig out of the ground or worry that if they escape they could kill animals.

It wasn't a bad idea, and if I was asked to contribute, I'd rather spend the money on that than on our failed War on Drugs, the War on Poverty or any other war that government tells us we are supposed to be fighting. When the objective is to stop drilling holes in our planet and work at something more progressive, I'm all in.

It's a shame that something like this has to happen to focus our attention on it. It's like those roadside memorials with flowers and a cross where some kid is hit by a drunk driver or some other roadway catastrophe. A few months later a traffic light goes up.

There should have been one there all along. Why does it take a tragedy to make us think?