The BP Boycott Starts Here
I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told.
But nonetheless, we live in Los Angeles, so we have 2 cars. One Honda Civic that sees a fair amount of road time, and one Ford Focus that sits unused 300 days a year. It’s kinda like having a spare bedroom for the 1 week a year when your parents visit. Ever so often, I’ll have to drive somewhere to meet Sarah or run some errands on my own. But really, I could accomplish pretty much 95% of the things I need to do with a bike and a tiny bit of motivation.
Today was one of those days that I needed the car and the car needed gas. This only happens about once every two months, on account of how seldom I drive. I had one rule when it came to getting the gas: do not buy from BP. There’s a reason for this, and it has to do with the news. Have you heard about the news? It’s an information-distribution system whereby you can learn about things that are happening in the world. Sort of like a sitcom, but real. If you have heard of the news and you watch or read the news, then you probably know that there’s some kind of oil disaster happening right now. And BP is the company responsible for this oil disaster.
Now, let’s get one thing straight: all oil companies are evil. Oil is evil. It’s what they call a “necessary evil,” because no one has taken the time to establish an alternative system to extracting it from the ground and using it to power things. These alternatives do exist and could, with relative ease, be implemented to make the use of oil less necessary — “relative ease” in terms of, say, “wiring the entire country for electricity,” mind you, not relative ease in terms of choosing between butter and margarine at the grocery store (team butter, holla!) — but as of this writing, plans to implement these alternatives have gotten about as far as the nacho delivery service dreams of a hungry stoner. We’ve known for quite some time that oil is evil and dangerous … decades, even … but we have still not put much effort into fixing the system for reasons that are unclear to me but probably have something to do with Americans’ innate distrust of things that are natural and people who remind them of hippies. (more…)
