As many commentators have pointed out in the past two months since the Deepwater Horizon fiasco began, this oil spill is both a terribly physical object lesson, and an almost limitless metaphor. It will change us, whether we fight the change or cry with relief.

Those who link this tarry mess to our pressing need to reduce our addiction to oil are in the right, as are the folks who have had enough of corporate dominance of our media and politicians ass-kissing the oil industry. We are destroying our country. This cannot be minimized, any more than that black crap you see in the photo above will disappear if we just look away.

SFGate columnist Mark Morford writes about how, with each fresh disaster, our language shifts to accommodate new human self-concepts—but that this particular catastrophe, as man-made, greed-driven, and eminently preventable as it was, may have strained the limits of our ability to mentally adapt.

I don’t envy those of you who give yourself the privilege of ignoring this crisis. Because I know that the only reason you can do so is that you’ve never been here. The only way you can bring yourself to not care is if you’d never walked these beaches, never taken them into your heart. I don’t envy you—I pity you immensely.

This is the local beach of my hometown, Pensacola.

Nowadays, when people say the word “home”, they’re usually referring to a building—a house. Our modern society’s trend of promoting both geographical moves and a desire to accumulate property has replaced an old meaning with a new one—as Morford describes tends to happen. We no longer think of “home” as a city or a community, only as our particular little box of goods and gadgets, amidst the anonymity of everyone else’s little boxes. “Home” is something that we own, not something that owns us.

In a lot of ways, this is great—we are free from many of the limitations that dogged our ancestors, and that continue to curtail the opportunities of many more stationary societies around the world. And I’d be a liar if I didn’t disclose that I’ve moved a great deal, and no longer live in Pensacola.

But it is my home in the traditional sense, and I am blessed with that burden. I know what it is to feel cradled by a place, to have a relationship with it. I watch it change, for good and bad, from the perspective of someone deeply affected. The people of Pensacola are a resilient, stubborn, isolationist, pleasure-loving lot, who shout religious nonsense at their neighbors but then help them pick up their yard after a hurricane. The city is 450 years old, nearly twice as old as our nation. And it is beautiful, in nature and culture. I am proud to own and be owned by it.

Plenty of you are also fortunate enough to feel that way about something in life—a loved one, a creative project, a pet, or a location.

Now imagine that this was poured over them.

Imagine watching them die.

Even worse—imagine watching them be killed, by someone who then goes sailing on a yacht, bought with money they made by the killing. Imagine having your hands tied, unable to help your beloved, having to stand by and hope the bastards who set up the torture also know how to dismantle it…and that they can be made to give a damn if you scream hard enough.

(Florida Governor Charlie Crist visiting Pensacola Beach, June 23, 2010)

(photos by  James Amerson and SPage)

I set my first novel in Pensacola for a reason. It is a barometer. The first outpost of Western civilization on the continent was placed here in 1559, and it’s been a quiet bellwether ever since. Shall we let it die? What would that say about us, who have grown so used to moving and leaving, that only our own little boxes seem real?

Self-concepts change. Tar is liquid death. And these boxes, these little fortresses we build against mounting catastrophe, are beginning to seem very, very small.

Related Posts

  1. Seriously, why?
  2. Blue Angel Crash
  3. Dennis