Who Do You Really Trust?

I’m not sure how far we should trust polls, but I wonder what the answer would be if anybody polled the American public on this question: With regard to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, who do you trust least—British Petroleum, the government, or the press? Rank them in order.”

I’m not in any way enamored with BP, but I’m pretty sure my own answer would be that I trust BP at least as much as I do the latter two entities. My hardest choice between those three would be the race for 2nd and 3rd Place between grandstanding politicians and an incredibly self-righteous press.

This is old news now (over a week old) but the New York Times was reporting the government announcement that three-quarters of the spewed-out oil has “already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated—and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.”

Nobody is saying that the spill hasn’t been a mess whose environmental, economic, and personal harm hasn’t already been horrendous. But, if this latest governmental assessment is true, it sounds like pretty good news—such good news that I’m surprised the media, which doesn’t like good news, would even report it. Surely they’ll “balance” it with a lot more questions and dire predictions from all sorts of “experts.” The oil may have stopped spewing but we can be sure that the experts will continue to spout for years to come. And we’ll all still want lots of oil, so I doubt any of us can afford much hypocritical hand-wringing.

And how does BP come out of this? Since I’m not one of their officers, employees, or stockholders, I’m afraid I’ll not lose too much sleep over it. But it will be interesting to see.

And I still wonder about the truth behind the mess. Was BP woefully and even criminally negligent, negligence that cost precious lives and lit the fuse for a major disaster? Or was this truly a tragic “accident”? (Those with a stake in the “blame game” can never afford to use that word.) Did BP violate some governmental regulations before the spill? I’m certain they did. Because of greed and recklessness? Or because government regulations in any such endeavor metastasize at such a rate that no one could possibly keep them all? (I don’t know, but look at the IRS code, take your taxes to three different preparers, and wait to receive three different “answers.” Or call the IRS for an answer, talk to three different bureaucrats, and I’ll betcha you’ll get three different answers more often than not.)

So where does the truth lie in all of this? I really don’t know. But I wonder.

The deeper question is this: Who do you really trust? Come to think of it, that’s the deepest and most important question of life: who do you really trust?

Only one answer is good enough. And only one God is big enough.






Copyright 2010 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.