you in oil

Look around yourself.  If you live in a city and are currently sitting in a man-made structure, there is nothing around you that did not profit an oil company. Not the clothes you are wearing or any item inside your house, nothing. Select an item in your environment.  From the power used to run the equipment to manufacture that item, to the plastic used in its components there is oil.  What, there is no plastic in the item you selected? How rare.  How was it transported from the place of manufacture to the store where you bought it? Did the store put it in a plastic bag for you? Did the store clerk ring up the item on a heavy duty plastic cash register while wearing a plastic name tag saying “Hi, my name is Underpaid"? Did you put the item in your gas powered car and drive it to your house?  Or did you bypass the store entirely and have the item delivered to you by a UPS truck? Was it packaged when you got it, what sort of packaging and where did it come from? Was it or any of its components made in, and shipped from, another country?  I defy you to find a single item in your house that did not directly or indirectly generate profit for an oil company. If you find one, let me know. And if you find one think about this:  have you ever moved and carried the item to your new house in a moving van?

So you tell me “I went to the cherry orchard on Sunnyvale-Saratoga road and walked home with – not a plastic bag of cherries, not a crate of cherries that would have used power saws and logging trucks, but a hand full of cherries! There!”  And I’ll ask you did you pay cash with manufactured currency or did you charge them to your plastic credit card?  You might tell me they were free, and I would then ask you how the workers who tended to the orchard get to work each day and what tools did they use? Hoses, water pumps, shears, fertilizer?

So you tell me that you picked them off a wild cherry tree in a vacant lot, and I will ask you - did you walk home on your tennis shoes on a paved road?  So you tell me you walked home on homemade shoes on a dirt road your grandfather cleared with his bare hands. And I will ask you – did you wash the cherries under some PVC piped tap water when you got home? Well water you tell me.  Did you draw the water in a plastic bucket from the well using a nylon rope or was it pumped by a power pump? Did you dry them on a manufactured paper towel? Did you put them in a manufactured bowl? On your linoleum counter-top?  There is nothing, not-a-thing, zip, zilch, nada, in your life that did not profit an oil company. Not your hair, freshly washed in plastic bottled shampoo, not your teeth, recently bushed with a plastic tooth brush, and certainly not your recently polished nails.

That’s not the scary part.  The scary part is that 100 years ago you would have been hard pressed to find an item in your house that did profit an oil company. You know, back when there was no hole in the ozone layer, the oceans weren’t dying out and every other species on the planet wasn’t going extinct… but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.