One Million Times Before.
What’s the best thing about having a cold house? You don’t have to bother putting the milk back in the fridge.
Why is our house so cold? Because oil has gone up 1000% in the last 8 years.
Thick, black, stifling, ancient, all important oil.
We are so desperate for it, I am considering joining one of those oil spill cleanup operations, and wringing out the sea birds myself into some secret container, scooping up particularly affected rocks into plastic bags, coming home and just throwing the whole caboodle at my heating system. Hell I could sell the things on eBay, oil soaked seagulls £20 each. Directions: Wring out bird (kindly) into heating system: repeat as required. Yes, the hard times called for us all to be more inventive in order to stay warm.
Here in England our news is lightly peppered with small deaths from our oil war. Deaths of strangers who have chosen to die, who have trained to die, and yet were never expected to die. And the scenes are of a smiling photo of a young man, and a peaceful coffin adorned with proud colourful medals moving silently down the street. But I remind you England. You are at war. And your soldiers did not die peacefully.
I wanted to take a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, scoop up the oil in giant hands and scream STOP at the top of my lungs. I would shout out so loudly that England would hear me and America would hear the echo of my voice. Remember England, that vast snake of protesters who had marched against the war, weaving their way through London in the faith that Mr. Blair would listen, stretching out from Hyde Park in the name of democracy, proud to be free, proud to be civilised, in green, green England’s capital city. Remember that we were ignored.
The oil had seeped into Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair’s dreams. Thick, black, stifling, all important oil. Blackened their thoughts and stuck their eyes shut so they could not see the protestors. Oil must have seeped into their ears so they could not hear the shouts of uproar, and it is still there I believe, they cannot hear the people screaming and dying, they cannot hear the mothers and the fathers and the children and the aunts and the uncles and the guilt and the fear and the acceptance and the apathy and the whispers, whispers, whispers of conscience. They cannot hear the tears fall onto deaf ears. And their own tears they are afraid to cry for I believe they too have turned black as oil and they do not flow so easily.
Couldn’t we have avoided all this by switching to electric? Use our great oceans to generate power. Instead of turning them black and sticky?
And the war. All because en masse humans are creatures of habit afraid to try something that they haven’t done one million times before.
- Ella Mai
