This is bad. This is very bad.

This is about as bad as it gets. Those are recent images from the Gulf of Mexico where a breached oil well has been spewing oil into the Gulf for two months non-stop. Non-stop. It is estimated that 125,000,000 gallons have flowed into the water so far, with no end in sight, Kevin Costner notwithstanding.

Imagine being a turtle or a sea bird and waking up in the morning (or whenever turtles and sea birds wake up) and finding your home awash with a substance that is the direct opposite of the water that gives you life. You look around and it is everywhere. The more you swim, the worse it gets, and you find that as you struggle your work is harder and it appears that the very work you do to extricate yourself worsens your dilemma. As an inhabitant, you are rightfully confused. What you call home is now a poison to you and it is killing you.

To accurately place yourself in their position, imagine that from above, millions of gallons of oil were poured into your house while you were sleeping. You awakened to some strange feeling but lacked the knowledge to identify it. You only knew that you were having trouble moving, breathing and it suddenly dawned on you that you could not find food and that your way of life was being threatened far beyond what any financial institution, workplace or governing body could impart on you. This is real life and death stuff.

For those of you who have the Bible as your guide, you will recall a passage where man is given dominance over the animals. It's in Genesis or one of those books near the beginning. Dominance however, does not include dumping toxic chemicals on them or encasing them in substances. There are rules, and those rules have been violated.

It is perhaps the saddest thing I have seen. A bird covered with oil, thinking, "What the f**k?" He has no idea that a world so dominated by one product would allow the production of it to endanger the very land that gave it to us. It's a strange relationship, where we pull toxins out of the bowels of our planet and use them to enhance our lifestyle. I'm not skilled enough to explore that, so I'll allow you to talk amongst yourselves.

Still it continues to flow, and the best answer we have is to drill another well to relieve the one that is leaking. Meanwhile, a part of our planet is dying.

The president was on television last week, and he stopped short of saying what I thought he should have said. He should have told us the truth. The truth isn't that BP is going to pay to clean this up or that we will kick somebody's ass or any of that political talk that sounds good on television. The truth is that this will take decades to clean up, and in the meantime, it will be as bad a disaster as we have seen, September 11 notwithstanding.

With hurricane season coming, my layman's knowledge of such matters wonders what happens if (or when) a hurricane comes through the Gulf and starts blowing wind and water out of the area. When it rains in Alabama, Tennessee and the southeast, will part of the rain contain oil from the Gulf of Mexico? I'm thinking it will and I'm thinking that our government doesn't want us to think about that, so they aren't saying anything.

But I'll say it, because I don't work for the government. Remember this when there are oil-coated cars, houses and animals inland.

Maybe I think too much.