Connective Visions

Your own thoughts, emotional habits, and actions in the past have been the primary focus of creating your current experience in the world. And every time you react to another person or thing with a particular set of thoughts or emotions, you’re deepening a tendency to see a world based on those types of projections…. By changing your own thoughts and emotions, you can literally change your world.

Lorne Ladner, Ph.D., The Lost Art of Compassion

Photo of Gulf oil spill by NASA's Terra satellite on May 24. NASA's Michon Scott explains, "The oil slick is brighter than the surrounding water in some places (image center) and darker ... in others (image lower right).

A couple people have asked why I haven’t been blogging so much lately. Largely, it’s been as simple as my Swedish friend and blogger Pelotard at Impopular Culture put it on his return: “Life intervened.” (Read him in the meantime. He’s back and on a roll.)  But I have also experienced a reluctance to add my voice to the particular pitch of public discourse in the United States – be it on Facebook or here.

I did try. Sitting in my WordPress draft folder are two different blogs related to BP’s mind-boggling mess in the Gulf of Mexico. The problem is, I value communication. So while the information that I am outraged by BP’s mess in the Gulf of Mexico will probably astound no one (seriously, does anyone approve of it?), coming up with something coherent, compassionate, and useful to insert into the conversation has proved a challenge beyond my time limits.

The reason is simple: neither I nor a significant portion of media and Facebook commentators have any oil-drilling engineering skills or experience whatsoever. Most Americans don’t. The bulk of the U.S. government most certainly does not. So the fact that BP doesn’t seem to have much expertise in the area either, while ridiculous and infuriating, is not something I can act upon more productively than to note it  – and that has seemed unnecessary, as  BP themselves have been adequately demonstrating it for nearly seven weeks.

Now, this issue does point to a direction for future policy. The questions we may usefully address, if we choose to, are:

• Do we want to keep allowing companies who don’t utilize the current technology or meet the highest safety standards to keep experimenting with the environment, and with people’s livelihoods that depend on that environment?
• If not, what are we going to do about our own demand for their product?”

Beyond looking in this direction, most of us cannot do more about the present spill than offer spiritual and financial support to the people hit by the disaster and working to restore the area. The financial element contains a dilemma, as many who have most vigorously complained about the oil spill and the response to it were first to scream, “We won’t pay for it!” That’s a logical conundrum worth pondering. But all the “spillcam” watching and blaming of Big Oil on the one hand, the government on the other, aren’t going to make an iota of difference to the people and wildlife of the Gulf.

They do, however, make a difference in us.

Fort Jackson, Louisiana International Bird Rescue Research Center. Photo by Lorna Baldwin, Deputy Senior Producer, PBS NewsHour. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License.

Over the week leading up to President Barack Obama’s visit to the Gulf Coast, people throughout both social-networking and mainstream media entered a state of near mental dilapidation. They wanted a webcam. They wanted to see the oil. They wanted a scapegoat. They wanted a solution. Between slamming the president before he opened his mouth and taking down every word out of BP CEO Tony Hayward’s, people were reaching the kind of frenzy depicted at the guillotine in the French Revolution.

“Fix it now!” was such a frequent post on Facebook that I wondered why the Zynga apps weren’t letting people send wrenches to their neighbors.

I completely understand the feeling of frustration. I spent a spectacularly wet afternoon sticking my finger in the bathroom sink’s faucet, trying to understand the physics of flow and pressure buildup, in the naive hope that I could come up with something more useful than the giant shower curtain idea (among the inventions that people have lamented BP ignoring).

My heart goes out to the shower curtain designer. It was an honest attempt, if on a par with my giant water balloon.

There are truths I’m afraid we miss when we confront these types of crises. Largest among them is that in some cases, we are helpless – and on a large scale. Iris Erlingsdottir pointed to this when the airline hysteria began to rise in response to Iceland’s volcanic eruption:

We like our cataclysms to be gradual — like global warming, or distant — like the Haiti earthquake or the south Asian tsunami. If they’re gradual, we commission studies, present papers, assemble conferences, sign treaties, award Nobel prizes, and kick the can down the road to the next generation. If they’re distant, we hold fundraisers, sing songs, hold prayer services, participate in photo ops, and do just enough to feel good about ourselves before allowing the affected area slowly slip from our consciousness into oblivion.

The BP oil spill in the Gulf doesn’t allow the United States the luxury of oblivion or postponement to a future generation. With an impact of “years,” not hours, we’ll not only witness but feel its effects for a long time to come: in our food supplies, in our tax dollars, and in our discourse. We are not going to be able to do much about any of it.

In other words: government, democracy, and expert corporations can’t solve some things.

Another truth relates to our human behavioral tendency toward “rubber-necking” and disaster watching. We tend to make our frustration worse by finding every way possible to dwell in it … usually while not addressing the core feelings behind it or the fact that we are contributing to our own agony. We saw this in the days after 9/11, when psychologists noted that persistent viewing of the traumatic images of the Twin Towers, while not talking through (not just “about”) the trauma, increased public stress.

Still, people kept watching.

I disagree with Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley writer and tech forecaster, that the Internet is behind our “emotional connection” to this latest disaster. As my goddaughter’s father once pointed out, we did the same thing in 1987, when the nation obsessed over Jessica McClure being trapped in an abandoned well shaft. For that matter, I see it every time there’s an accident on the Schuylkill Expressway and the traffic grinds uselessly to a halt to watch police and paramedics doing their jobs.

Dead catfish on Grand Isle, Louisiana. Photo by Flickr user golden goat. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License.

What is unprecedented in tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico isn’t the communications technology. It’s the fact that a real impact on us, from our own behavior, is being presented to us: the reality that we don’t have the most effective or safest technology, nor the superior expertise, we have imagined we possess, so that we can continue to extract a resource we don’t want to do without.

Until we face this element that we avoid in ourselves, we’re not working through the Gulf oil spill. We’re ranting about it. And trying to conduct a conversation in rant form is like talking to a drunk. Better to wait until he or she sobers up.

If we keep watching every report in the news feeds, getting to the point of productive conversation may take a very long time.

I’m as guilty of it as anyone. I finally decided to write this blog when I read of  BP’s latest demonstration of stupendous corporate arrogance in its purchase of Google and Yahoo search phrases related to “oil spill,” in order to boost its image of effectiveness. But as I wrote, I hit the same wall I ran into in the two previous blog attempts: namely, I don’t know what more to say about the oil spill.

It is heartbreaking. It is anxiety-producing. And it is raising more questions for me than answers. I am more aware than ever of my own energy usage – and as reluctant as anyone to leap into an oil-free lifestyle (assuming I even could).

As I ponder the issue, I believe we all need to change the lenses through which we address this disaster and others. In a toxic environment of blame, complaint, and ceaseless criticism, that is very hard to do. So perhaps we need to take another step back and ask: how well do any of us work with constant yelling and hostility around us?

That is another environment we are creating. And maybe it’s the first one that needs to be addressed, so that we can think more clearly about the practical one.