It’s The Only World We’ve Got

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." Genesis 1:26

A night ago I was privileged to eat at Pappadeaux Seafood. The meal started off with a steaming bowl of crawfish bisque. My hubby continued the crawfish theme, ordering the crawfish platter. Half his plate was covered with a load of fried crawfish and the other half crawfish etoufee. I feasted on one of their fried seafood platters. My plate overflowed with fried catfish, shrimp, stuffed crab and stuffed shrimp on a bed of homemade French fries. I used up four paper cups full of tartar sauce. The platter was supposed to have fried oysters too, but they have a tendency to make me break out in a rash so I opted for extra shrimp.

Between bites of the seafood feast my mind drifted to the British Petroleum owned oil well spewing crude oil, unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico. The same body of water where my family has fished, swam, played in the sand and hunted for shells for over forty years.

I’m sickened to think about all that oil ending up on Gulf Coast beaches. As a child growing up in Houston in the eighties, my family spent many a weekend on Galveston Island. One of my not so fond memories of those trips included watching where you stepped because of the pools of black tar that dotted the sand. Of course it was to no avail. The tar ended up on us anyway, staining our feet and subsequently the floorboard of our cars.

A list of oil spills on the internet revealed a spill in 1979 by the Mexican government owned oil company, Pemex. The spill added up to approximately three million barrels…I believe this was the cause for the tar on the Texas beaches for so many years. I remember staying at an upscale hotel on Galveston at that time and along with the usual shampoo and soap, guests were given oil-removing hand wipes for trips to the beach!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-oil companies. After all, it’s oil money that supports my family. I am however saddened that the oil has been flowing for more than forty days and no one can come up with a solution that will actually fix the problem. Worse still is the thought of the natural resource being literally washed out to sea. It’s the only world we’ve got people! And it sickens me to think that my youngest son’s coastal memories might now include watching out for globs of black goo in the sand just like when I was a kid.

Father God, You gave us the earth and the seas as a gift to use and care for. But right now we’re failing horribly. Lord forgive us for what we’ve done and help us to fix the damage we’ve caused to your glorious creation. Amen

Oh, and the Pappas family…they have already begun legal proceeding against BP for what this spill is going to do to their business.

Picture courtesy of Reuters.Com