via The Ladies’ Guide to the Apocalypse
I’ve been reading and following the disaster in the Gulf and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. If I had the capability — namely, if I had the money and the ability to just up and and leave my life, I would. I would go down there and do whatever it took to help clean up the oil spill — even if that meant deploying hair booms and getting arrested by BP and fined 5000 dollars and sent to prison. I’d do it anyway.
No compromise in defense of the planet.
No compromise in keeping the oceans alive — if we even can anymore.
I sit here in Powell River, another coastal community, and I feel absolutely helpless. My warrior spirit is champing at the bit, bloody flecks of foam as it screams DO SOMETHING.
I cannot. I am at home for a good reason. Tomorrow is my mom’s surgery and I must be here — in my own worldview, my own set of values and morals, it’s duty to family above all else.
But doesn’t that include the earth? Doesn’t it include the wolf packs being shot down from helicopters, the birds and fish and marine mammals drowning in the black sludge in the bayou, the trees being murdered by Island Timberlands, the insects, once so plentiful in summer, now you hardly see a stain on your windshield as you drive down the long freeway. Doesn’t family mean them too? Don’t I have a duty to them?
Yes. I do. And for what it’s worth, if it’s worth anything, I do what I can in my hometown. I am going to be organizing a hair and nylons drive for Matter of Trust to help with the oil spill, and here at home I recycle and compost and garden organically and eat organically and local as possible, though since certain events we no longer appear at the farmer’s market because of certain slandering individuals whom I may have strong words with if I see them again and so that makes local organic rather difficult, but we try.
We try hard. My dam and I, members of a wolf-pack short one member since May 16th, we do everything we can.
And I look at the news and think it’s not enough, it’s never going to be enough, and my children are going to grow up in a world poisoned by our greed and selfishness, and my daughter will look at me with reproach in her eyes, asking “Why didn’t you do more?”
I’m sorry, baby. I tried.