(crossposted from TPMCafe)
There is a lot of indignation going around these days from the inhabitants and citizens of the great automobile nation as they listen to the oil spillage news in horror during their long commute over scores of miles of freeway. Their beautiful Gulf of Mexico has become a huge oil slick and they all now seek, left and right, whom to blame. I myself a born native of the shores of Lake Maracaibo, a fresh water enclosed bay formed from the rivers flowing down from the Andes mountains, have never had time to be shocked by oil slicks.
The world's oldest extant oilfield in the West of Venezuela was our pride as the ships departed with huge cargoes for our friends up in North America so they could cheaply drive past the fast food store window and enjoy jobs two hours drive away, yet have the priiledge to live in the pristine exurbs with no sidewalks or pesky businesses nearby. We seldom complained about the diminishing tonina, an endemic fresh water cetacian related to dolphins, nor of the disfiguring fields of oil derrick towers replacing the pre-Columbian palafito, the indigineous stilted houses which inspired Spanish explorer Alonso de Ojeda to call this nation, Little Venice, or, translated to Spanish, Venezuela, around the same time North America was discovered by Europeans.
We built our cities, our universities, our schools and hospitals with the oil-produced wealth and people from all over South America and the Caribbean and even beyond - of course there were also many "Americans" (South Americans do consider themselves Americans but that is another discussion) from Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma - plagued our country seeking opportunity. They came from Italy, Germany, Portugal, Argentina and they prospered, but many came less prepared only to create the hugest barrios in the world. Black gold brought us the fine arts and culinary delights, theatres and museums, luxuries, and then of course, gross corruption, and now we live in a regime which claims to be socialism, but really is one of mere anger. During all this vertiginous growth of metropolises and crises, we never complained about the golden lake that turned black from the oil and green from the large oil metropolitan city waste. We received our "dolares" together with the pollution, and Los Angeles inhabitants got to drive and drive and drive for cheap.
On my first visit to the states, it was clear what that oil had enabled. Having been used to walking to the bakery, bank, or school in my native Venezuela and afterward in Europe, I found it puzzling how hostile a place this automobile scaled country really was. This college student felt trapped on campus after having been used to freedom from the automobile, to walk to take care of my immediate needs, to hop on a tram or bus to visit the museums and cultural activities, to take a train at any convenient time to visit other cities, and all of a sudden, I could not even cross streets devoid of sidewalks to reach food stores miles away in what was supposed to be the greatest country in the world.
I then discovered the inner-city of the eighties, not the gentrified one we know today, but the abandoned one that showed remains of a human scale habitat, and I saw the color and the poverty of the people walking those streets, and it was all clear. My country's abundant cheap oil and polluted lake had enabled the final stage of racial segregation and fearmongering known as white flight. Cheap fuel allowed jobs to be built far away from the urban poor and the affluent to move as far away as possible from desegregation to monstruous moonscapes filled with sprawl, desolation, chain restaurants, bland living, no street life, no sidewalks, no freedom for children, no habitat for the elderly, and all of this sucking up a quarter of the world's hydrocarbons.
People have returned to the cities and rationality seems to be returning, but let us not forget what really happened. As I once wrote in a comment a few weeks ago:
Racism led to flight,
'f the righteous and moral white,
Leaving the cities in blight,
Opportunities far from sight.
Hopelessness led to crime,
By young people in their prime,
Stuck in the urban grime,
No jobs to be found in their time.
Flight led to excess in sprawl,
The monstrous shopping mall,
No sidewalks, no street life at all,
How tragic our habitat's fall.
Five percent of Earth's inhabitants,
Now use up one fourth of all carburants,
Blame for this greed and ignorance,
Belongs to the party of elephants.
There truly is no quick solution,
Now that the gulf is in pollution,
The culprits now seek absolution,
They fear a green revolution.
Amazing the mess created,
Just to keep us all segregated,
Past hatred unmitigated,
A coastline so decimated.
In our cities we must re-invest,
Of all options this is the best,
Posterity needs this bequest,
Our era must not fail this test.
A habitat for children and elderly,
Free from that oppressive SUV,
With parks, sidewalks, civility,
City life offers the best quality.
So now so many of us seek to blame someone as if this slick is the result of some new phenomenon. As someone born in the oil slick that cheaply powered your automobile lifestyle,I can only sigh at the tantrums of so many left and right who live the lifestyle which led to the death of the waters of my dear Little Venice near the equator. To those who delight in blame and public indignation, they shall have their rewards; however, may they also reflect on the society they and their parents have built out of fear and divisiveness, apartheid and greed, which has led to this catastrophe.
It is time to stop the tantrums, build our habitat as real communities rather than vast spans of isolation, and to catch that Metro bus just as the abandoned underclass do.