"Crude Oil" is a Good Name For It

I don't think we can argue with the fact that what is happening to the Gulf right now is "crude" in every sense of the word. Here are a few definitions of the word "crude" from various sources:

"not carefully or expertly made"

Yeah, you can say that again...someone forgot to engineer a shut off valve on that multi-million dollar piece of extraction equipment. Things go wrong and all, and not being a trained engineer in petroleum transfer technology, I'm sure I'm jumping the gun by suggesting that there should have been, let's say a "switch" or something like that to shut the thing down below the surface...but you know what they say about hindsight.

conspicuously and tastelessly indecent as in "coarse language"

"a crude joke"; "crude behavior"; "an earthy sense of humor"; "a revoltingly gross expletive";"full of language so vulgar it should have been edited.

I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that what is happening, or not happening, in the Gulf is in the neighborhood of "indecent." To boot, phrases like "drill baby drill" fall into the classification of "crude language." If we look at the this whole business of puncturing holes beneath the surface of a large--really large--body of water to extract a coarse soup of sticky, toxic hydrocarbons so that we can run the combustion engines of commerce and war, "crude behavior" is not far off the mark. I would go as far as to say it is indeed "revolting." I can only hope that we humans will "edit" our actions and evolve to the point where future generations will look back on us cave people and say, "Our predecessors were clever but awfully crude...now we run our engines on solar and steam and we have no use for weapons any more, but we thank the idiots of yesteryear for creating the foundations of true civilization at long last."

"unrefined: not refined or processed"

Relating directly not only to the oil itself but also the human state of mind in creating ingenious inventions that ruin basic living systems...kind of cancels out the ingenious part and leaves us with "crude."

"belonging to an early stage of technical development; characterized by simplicity and (often) crudeness; "the crude weapons and rude agricultural implements of early man."

Poetic...Speaks for itself...needs no commentary, like a series of thematically related Haiku.

"blunt: devoid of any qualifications or disguise or adornment; "the blunt truth"; "the crude facts"; "facing the stark reality of the deadline"petroleum: a dark oil consisting mainly of hydrocarbons not processed or subjected to analysis; "raw data"; "the raw cost of production"; "only the crude vital statistics."

What is the "blunt truth" about this situation? Well, I hate staring at truth as much as the next guy, but here goes: "I have found the enemy and he is us." That's right, it's not BP or the Gov'ment, or Terrorism ( or even Socialism) that's to blame for this nightmare in our own backyard swimming pool. To illustrate this reality, my wife has just informed me that we are "out of milk and half and half" so I have to now end this blog entry to drive to the store and pick up more provisions. I live in a remote town at the end of winding foothill roads. How did the milk even get to our little country store in the first place? Maybe it's time I get a cow? In any case, if I have to go to the store anyway, I might as well pick up a 6-pack to get through Memorial Day.