Mr. President, A Letter You’ll Never Read

Sunday, 04 July 2010

I haven’t watched the news. I haven’t looked at photos on the internet. I politely asked that my co-workers not mention or discuss it around me. The truth is that the mere thought of it makes my blood boil and stomach turn. Today I finally looked at photos and read about this event, and my heart is broken.

This is because I know that no solution is on the horizon and the useless, political spider webs only maintain the status quo, which is an entire lack of a solution.

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To British Petroleum; with all due respect, President Obama; and everyone else involved – I don’t care anything about what you’re trying to do to resolve the Gulf Coast Oil Spill. The result is the same.

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Mr. President, I live in Seattle now, but I grew up and lived for 27 years of my life in the South, visiting the Alabama and Florida beaches more times than I can count. The majority of my family still resides in the Southern United States (Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky). Our roots in this region are deep.

My family spent their entire lives traveling to the Gulf of Mexico’s coastal beaches on holiday. It’s a heritage and tradition that died on April 20, 2010. My children will no longer be able to one day visit those beaches in the same way that I and multiple generations before me did, beaches that as I stood on the French beaches of Le Bassin d’Arcachon in 1999 – who pale in comparison to the pristine beaches of the Florida panhandle – I counted myself lucky to have experienced so often. Even at eighteen years old, I understood what a beautiful gem our country has in calling the Gulf of Mexico its own.

I have to ask. Would it matter if it were your childhood memories being massacred, if the oil spill had occurred off the coasts of Oahu, Waimea Bay, Lanakai, Hanauma Bay or Waikiki? Would that make it more urgent to find a feasible solution? What about Cape Cod or Elliott Bay? San Francisco Bay?

In 2005, I was still living in the South when Katrina hit. A year in advance, I’d planned a trip for my sister’s birthday to take her to New Orleans for the first time. Instead, we found ourselves huddled overnight in a local church. We were lucky. Katrina didn’t hit our city as hard as many other places.

We worked for months with local organizations to provide food, shelter and other aid to the refugees who’d lost their homes. Our stores worked with programs that provided this much needed aid, despite the daily issues that doing so created with checkout processes. We helped people whose lives were completely usurped rebuild in a new place.

A year later our leaders sent our city’s youth (in our annual event always used to work to better our own city) to Gulfport, Mississippi to work to help rebuild houses and schools that were still in dire need of repair. There were so many needs and not enough time. Even in 2006, there were still refrigerators washing up on shore, and we weren’t allowed to get into the water at the beach for fear of being cut by glass. To date, it’s the only time I’ve been to a beach and not touched the water.

This area is still recovering, still trying to rebuild the environment that their heritage is rooted in. For this second calamity to be allowed to happen is beyond a catastrophe. It’s unthinkable that this much pain and hardship should be suffered upon a region so immensely and repeatedly. These beaches are the livelihood and heritage for so many.

Beaches like Pensacola, Destin, Gulf Shores, Dauphin Island, Perdido Key – all ruined by an oil company’s inability to act responsibly and a government’s inability to maintain regulations that keep such ridiculous circumstances from occurring in the first place.

I use the word ridiculous with purpose – in 1999 had someone told me that this was even a possibility, I would have laughed hysterically. This is a ridiculous situation that we are in. Oh, and there’s also that the oil continues to endlessly flow into the Gulf of Mexico with no HOPE of a solution after over two months. Ridiculous isn’t a strong enough word.

And Mr. Obama, isn’t that the message on which you campaigned? HOPE. I’ve seen the word in huge type everywhere I go. Your campaign marketing was so well-designed and popular that Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ font, “Gotham”, is all the rave now. So much that it’s even featured in a recent book in which Patricia Cornwell writes, “The typeface is supposed to suggest credibility.”

Credibility? Respectfully, sir, you my president are losing all credibility with this American citizen and countless others – many who voted to put you into office not so long ago. Today is JULY 04, 75 days since the spill began. I suppose if I don’t speak out on this of all days of the year, why have freedom of speech? So I’m writing a letter that you’ll never read.

I don’t care about all of the excuses, the celebrities who want to convene to try to help, the SNL skits about the ridiculous measures that British Petroleum continues to take that prove entirely ineffective. I care that the oil spill is contained now, so that measures may be taken to contain the after-effects that will be suffered upon the southern and eastern United States for years to come and so that these regions and the families who lost their loved ones in the initial explosion can begin to heal.

Sir, you are the President of the United States. ACT EFFECTIVELY NOW. You have the brightest minds and largest amount of resources at your disposal. Be the leader we are all waiting for you to be. Please help my generation believe that the government will and does have the power to make change. That’s what your campaign inspired – HOPE. Help us learn to HOPE. As individual citizens, we are unable to act to stop the leak. Stopping the leak is in your hands.

ACT EFFECTIVELY NOW. We need you, sir.

At the beginning of this letter, I told you what I don’t care about; this is for what I do care:

Salvaging the heritage, traditions and lives of the peoples in this region, like my family, seen below.

(My great grandmother – left; grandmother – right)