Superman is Not Coming to Save Us

Dear Friend and Reader:

There was a point during President Obama’s press conference on the Deepwater Horizons oil spill last Friday when I knew the answers we were about to get from him were not going to be enough. Not lies or secrets. Just not enough. I think even he felt the same way. There was an air of impatience, irritation, and overwhelm at that press conference making me sense even he knew he could not provide the answers we needed or even the ones that we wanted to hear, as much as we clamored for him and the federal government to lead on this disaster.

While waiting for results of ‘Top Kill’, BP’s most failed recent effort to stem the oil-gushing wound in the Gulf’s seabed, we prayed for the oceans, the Gulf eco-sphere, and for the EPA, the Coast Guard, the President and everyone involved to find answers. We wanted something to work. We wanted the gulf restored. We wanted this month-long disaster miniseries to end. We wanted something, or someone to save us.

Since then, ‘Top Kill’ has failed several attempts, along with the Junk Shot and the Top Hat and all the other half-baked methods that the oil giant has tried. Today, the diamond-blade saw being used to cut the welded pipe at the spill is stuck. BP, whose stock is tumbling as we speak, is still technically in charge of this mess, though nervously covering its tracks while grasping for diminishing answers to stem the toxic flow, and attempting to hide evidence.

The federal government, slowly encroaching, is making its inexorable march towards BP’s criminal indictment. There is still no schedule, no time frame, no clear-cut solution, an unclear trajectory towards justice for those injured and no happy ending in the face of the expanding ecological tragedy called “Deep Water.”

The chaos caused by BP is as dastardly as anything Superman’s arch villain Lex Luthor could ever dream up. However, we have no superhero to dive into the ocean depths and plug that gushing well. There’s no one to reverse the world’s rotation on its axis to back up time by forty days and prevent the explosion that started the event. Technology, the kryptonite of the 20th century, is not going to save us.

The Gulf spill has been front and center of our focus over the last six weeks (much longer than the week allotted to our regularly scheduled disaster porn), and the waiter is presenting us — the world’s biggest oil users — the bill. This could actually be the beginning of a good thing.

There has been an incredible series of risks and innovations that have moved the world from the industrial to the virtual age. We’ve gone from steam engines to 4G networks in little over 100 years. We have invented ourselves to a place where we’ve eliminated distance between people on different continents, changed night into perpetual day and made the leap past our planet’s gravitational field into another part of our solar system. We have been supermen in that we have overcome the known boundaries of the world, exceeding well past them.

Longing for a new horizon has been hard wired in the consciousness of this country since it began, and indeed into the consciousness of humanity. Once we found our way to our furthest western shore, we unfortunately brought that consciousness to other nations, assuming it was our manifest destiny to use others’ resources to feed our material ambitions. We have gotten used to exploring the new boundaries: space, power, energy, chemistry, knowing that miracle cure, that mystic power, that marvelous new thing — regardless the cost to ourselves and others — was just around the corner. Our needs and ambitions have far exceeded our planet’s capacity to cope and right now, there is no horizon but deep water. We haven’t invented anything yet that can save us from ourselves.

I’m not advocating halting our quest for knowledge and innovation. On the contrary, we need to constantly improve the quality of our lives. But that improvement is not going to be from our gadgets, toys and vehicles or for that matter our energy sources. Our improvement needs to be in the quality of our thoughts and feelings, which affect how we live. It begins not with a product but with me. I need to take a look at what I’ve been thinking and reacting to and realize that I must confront my consumerism, my vanity, my insecurity and my desire to isolate myself from people different from me. This is more than just about driving too much. Its about what I spend my time on, what I’m chasing around pointlessly for, and what cost these pursuits have on our world.

We have been fabulously inventive these last two centuries, yet we are now brought to this place of feeling isolated in a nation of 250 million people, wondering why we’re so alone. Isn’t it ironic Oprah is promoting a new law banning phone texting while driving? The number of deaths on the road caused by people desperate for connection would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic:  its a telltale sign that we have passed the point of no return from having actual deep, meaningful human contact in our daily lives.

In some estimates, the gushing well could be contained by August, if the relief well method works. Others say using conservative estimates given the depth of the drilling, we may not even have it contained by December. We’ve literally hit rock bottom. But this is more than an oil well. We can’t go any further, any deeper, and any more extreme with the resources we have left materially or spiritually. Not without coming to grips with the ramifications of inventing technology, our Superman, without conscience or conscientiousness. Our land is wounded, and the repercussions of that wound will be facing us well into the future. What can we do now that Superman can’t, but that we must, in order to save ourselves from our own feelings of emptiness?

The direction of our goals as individuals must change. The stars we have to seek now need to be found within — and together.

Yours and truly,

Fe Bongolan
San Francisco