Editorial: People feel powerless, and boycotting BP is all they've got

When it comes to reacting to this BP oil spill in the Gulf, people are feeling a lot of things these days. We feel anger, obviously, for a multitude of reasons. We feel frustration, too, and sadness. Tucked way up here in Minnesota, our sadness pales in comparison to, say, someone who makes their living from the Gulf waters and is now facing a bleak future. You know, the level of sadness that makes a fisherman take his boat out into the Gulf the other day and shoot himself in the head. Yes, the oil spill-inspired suicides are starting to pile up.
   

We also feel helpless…powerless, to do anything about anything. Our government doesn’t seem too concerned. Sure, the Obama Administration placed a six-month moratorium on new offshore drilling leases, but if this were an old TV sitcom, the laugh track would have kicked in right after the word “leases” earlier in this sentence. Soon, it will be business as usual in the oil drilling industry. Shell has all sorts of new leases ready to go, and, before the Gulf spill, an environmental impact assessment conducted by oil-lover Ken Salazar and his fearless Department of Interior staff didn’t even bother to consider a worst-case spill of 20,000 barrels a day because it simply wouldn’t happen. Do you think that assessment has been modified at all since the Gulf spill? Nope.
   

Then there’s BP itself. Once the moratorium is up, they’ll get busy in Arctic waters, where they’ve built their own gravel island that they’re calling “Liberty.” Doing something never done before, they’re going to drill a couple miles beneath the frigid ocean floor, then drill six to eight more miles horizontally to get to the oil. In 2008, a BP official, describing the process, said it’s “about as sexy as it gets.” And it’s going to happen, even though if a Gulf-like disaster happened in Arctic waters, it would take weeks for anyone to get there even to begin to assess the situation and try to figure out what to do. Oh, and the weather is the “harshest on the planet” up there, BP says, but they’re going to try for a year-round operation and hope that things don’t get too nasty.
   

That previous paragraph is all out of the latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine, the only major media outlet, a rock and roll magazine, that appears to have any guts these days.
   

So we feel helpless and powerless. What are we going to do? Call our financial advisor and tell him to sell our BP stock? We probably don’t even know if we own any. A minor league baseball team in Florida, the Manatees, changed their pregame batting practice ritual, known as “BP” in the baseball world, to “hitting rehearsal.” That’s cute, but it’s really nothing.
   

All we can do is not give BP any of our money – for the purposes of our sanity, let’s leave our tax dollars out of this discusison today – and that means not filling up our vehicles at BP gas stations. That’s what people are doing, and now the people who own those gas stations are up in arms, saying that they’re independent businessmen who happen to have the BP logo on their signs. Boycott them, and we’re not hurting BP, we’re just hurting Joe Businessman down the street, they say.
   

Maybe so…maybe so. But it’s all we’ve got. And, the latest word is that BP is going to give hurting distributors and gas station owners some money to offset boycott-inspired losses.
   

See? So everything’s going to be fine. Well, everything except for that worst-oil-spill-ever thing.