7 Days In The Life Of A Catastrophe

Making the long drive home, I looked up at myself in the rearview mirror. Yep. I was listening, so I must be one of the everyones.

Seismic? A college football team changing conferences or a 25-year-old basketball player changing teams could be seismic only in a country where all the basics were taken care of: air, water, soil, food, shelter, education. Obsessing over Nebraska and LeBron, over fun and games, was a luxury that evolved because we had all those things; the loss of them would turn sports back into what they once were, a frivolity, an occasional sideshow. That was the answer to everyone's question. That's all it took for the Gulf oil spill to be a sports story: one look at the whole chain.

And they were right, those two radio sports guys, about far more than Nebraska's flight from the Big 12: It's all being driven by money and fear. That's what had made the out-of-uniform cop in the oil port of Fourchon, on the edge of the marsh, erupt from his police car and scream that if I didn't leave now he would arrest me for trespassing ... for driving on a public road toward the shoreline.

That's what made everyone keep subdividing, compartmentalizing, seeing only his link.

That's what made the oil company try to hide the carnage and send the oil underwater.

That's what made all the marsh dwellers scream about the moratorium on deepwater drilling, even though that was the very thing that had just shattered their way of life.

That's what kept their leaders from doing what they knew must be done, and their countrymen from demanding it: the conversion to energy that didn't poison the water or land or keep us mired in expensive wars when the national bank was broke.

Affluence is a funny thing. Once so many millions of people have so many millions of dollars at stake, even life-and-death issues are resolved on the basis of what protects my money, right now—not the general good or the planet's health. Money and fear will choke even the strongest to death ... unless they take that step back, take that breath, and see what money and fear are doing to them.

I called Mr. Eugene a few days after I got home. He couldn't help himself, the old man said, he didn't want to lose his memory. He'd gone and caught 2,000 minnows, placed them in his big underwater basket where they'd always lasted a good four or five days, and he was stunned, the very next day, to find every one of them dead. Oil had been sighted on Grand Bayou. It was just too much for him to wonder if that's what had killed them all. All he could do was fall to his knees and cry.