It's Complicated

Once, a thousand years ago, a buddy and I attended at Writers Conference in, I think, New Orleans at the the State school campus. They were just getting the Writers thing off the ground and had a problems getting writers and editors to attend the thing and so there was a "workshop class" run by a PR guy for the off shore oil company down there, that I cannot even remember which company it was. (We were twenty something.) Anyway, he started off his talk showing us a slide something like this and talking about how beautiful this was.
We got up and sneaked out without any comment except for a glance at each other. A buddy now, an engineer for a big oil company out here in California, who I have been backpacking with for four or five years has explained the problem in the gulf and economics of the low grade drilling that took over the gulf and why there is major oil in the swamps of Louisiana now, and it all makes perfect sense, except that the companies are making a 120% profit this year and eighteen and nineteen year old boys are dying so that these companies can obtain oil leases in the countries where we are destroying the governments. When we are dead and gone, someone very smart will write a brilliant history of the 21st century oil wars and everypne will understand it in that context. Now we are liberating the Middle East so the folks there can be free. Free to choose a capitalistic society so that the oil companies can make money for their shareholders/

We have meet the enemy and they are us.