Katy McDermott

I don’t live by the gulf coast or anywhere near it. The only time I ever went to Louisiana was years ago, for a corporate meeting, and like pretty much every other tourist I drank too much and ate a beignet. But I don’t think you need to have a lifelong shrimper’s clout to be enraged by the idea of a way of life dying thanks to cost-cutting by Big Oil.

The closest I’ve come to understanding this way of life is listening to heavily-accented fishermen with French-sounding names lament their losses on CNN. How can they ever be compensated for the fact that the ocean on which they depended for their livings is now glutted and streaked with oil – so much oil that there are reportedly “dead zones” where nothing will ever grow, or swim, again?

This is the power of the media at work. I see long stories – mini-documentaries, really – about the lives of gulf coast fishermen, and I feel as if I’m there. It is – well, was – beautiful. Mile after mile of mostly calm ocean, sea birds swooping after the shrimpers’ boats, one generation sharing the secrets of net-making, boat-building, and gumbo-stewing with the next.

You see, it’s not just the fishermen, shrimpers, and oystermen affected. It’s everyone who supports those industries too. And of course, it’s everyone who serves tourists like me by running restaurants, motels, sightseeing tours, and the like.

All of them – every single one of them – need a gulf coast that is unspoiled.

Unoiled.

They say it could be decades before the region comes back to the way it was. At least a generation.

Imagine you’re a netmaker’s daughter or a shrimper’s son – your parents and their parents and their parents before them all earned a living from the coast. You knew your future was secure – after all, you’d been out on the water or in the portside shop since shortly after you could walk. Now, though, you have to find a different kind of life, because this awful thing has happened and ruined in a few short weeks what has been there for centuries. You can’t even shake your fist and rage at God or fate – this curse is manmade. Oh, it’s okay for you – you’re young, you can find another way to live. But what about your parents, and their parents? Your heart twists with pity at the thought of them spending their close-to-retirement years clad in BP-issued vests cleaning tarballs off the beaches and laying thousands of feet of useless boom in the rust-colored ocean…

But there are no telethons for this. No generous fellow Americans donating money to help rebuild your way of life, compensating your parents and their parents for everything they’ve lost.

When a friend of mine pointed this out, it got me thinking. Why aren’t there telethons? There were telethons to benefit the tsunami victims, the Haitian earthquake victims, the victims (many of those same people who are now suffering because of the oil spill) of Hurricane Katrina.

I think there are a lot of reasons – and the reasons are complex.

First, no one died – well, no one after the initial eleven rig workers who perished in the Deepwater Horizon explosion that started all this. You don’t hold telethons for eleven people, plus, none of the eleven were children. Nothing gets people to open their checkbooks like footage of shattered parents sobbing over the broken bodies of their dead children. We hold our own children tighter – and quickly call an 800 number to make a donation.

Second, for many of the workers on the gulf coast, theirs were cash businesses. And “it was a cash business” often translates to “we didn’t pay taxes on our income.” Americans may pay one of the lowest tax rates of countries in the developed world, but there isn’t one of us who doesn’t feel unfairly burdened when we fill out our tax returns and send in our checks to the government on April 15. Why should we give money to people when we assume a lot of them didn’t even pay their taxes? So they’re being punished. Serves ‘em right, right?

Third, I don’t think we want to look too closely at what this spill represents. It’s terrible, to be sure. But BP wouldn’t have been drilling if we weren’t so dependent on oil in the first place. That’s the real conundrum – what should we do? Return to the Middle Ages? Stop traveling, stop driving? Stop doing the things that are so entwined in the American way of life? If we’re to continue as we are – this dependent on oil – then this sort of thing is going to happen. As I said, I don’t think we want to look too closely at it.

It’s a whole lot less complicated to seethe on behalf of the wildlife.

The issue that seems to upset people most is the fate of the pelicans. Who can forget that iconic picture of a drowning-in-oil bird, wings flailing, mouth wide open as if screaming “why have you done this?”

Perhaps we could organize a telethon for them.