I Am To Blame For The Gulf Oil Spill

As hurricane season begins to effect the Gulf of Mexico, efforts to contain the seemingly endless spill of oil seems likely to once again face setbacks. Though 30,000 souls and 6,000 ships are working to control the mess as the Macondo Oil Prospect voids its bowels into the waters of the Gulf, those efforts will have to be temporarily abandoned if storms threaten. Which they almost certainly will.

The disaster is now 16 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill, making it far and away the worst ecological mess ever to impact the United States. And as everyone involved seems to sense at a gut level, it isn't just not over. It's going to get worse.

It's blame time, of course. Someone has to be to blame in this godawful fustercluck.

Conservatives blame Obama because he, well, he's Obama. Liberals blame BP and the whole corporate profit thing, 'cause that's what they do. Some folks call for boycotts of BP, although how that's going to help them maintain solvency so they can deal with the mess they made is beyond me. BP blames the government, or subcontractors, or just bad mojo.

What no one seems to be doing is taking responsibility for the mess. So I'll say it.

I am responsible for the oil spill in the Gulf.

Yeah, I have nothing directly to do with the oil industry. I also don't use a ton of fuel. Our Scion was an efficient little econocube. Our new Prius gets over 50 mpg. My motorcycle gets close to 60 mpg. But we have an old minivan that scrambles to get 19 mpg in the combined cycle. I drive every single day. I totally rely on the combustion of petroleum to get around and to maintain the patterns of my life.

As such, I am a part of America's insatiable demand for fuel. I make it economically feasible for companies to keep pushing the outer envelope of engineering, drilling deeper and deeper in more and more inhospitable environments. The Macondo oil prospect, which the Deepwater Horizon was trying to tap, contains a total of 50 million barrels of oil. That seems like a lot, particularly as we consider what two point one billion gallons of crude will look like when it washes up on the shores of Louisiana and Texas and Florida.

Until you consider that we Americans burn that much fuel in less than three days. Every seventy-two hours, we put that amount of gas in our cars and burn it and pour what remains into the atmosphere. I am a part of that.

When I stand before my Maker on the Day of Judgement, and I'm asked what kind of job I did caring for creation, I'm not fool enough to think I'm going to be able to weasel my way out of my own share of this mess.

So now you know who to blame.

Feel better?

Gaming, Evil, and the Virtual World

Having recently read a blogosphere exchange about whether or not gaming can be art, several recent moments of online unpleasantness cause me to wonder if gaming can be actively evil.

As a pastor and a gamer, I try to steer away from games that are overtly negative. Meaning, I don't like games that require me to steal, or games that require me to harm innocents, or games that so deeply revel in horror that you can't play 'em without indulging in a fantasy of darkness. True, I do indulge in plenty of..err...aggressive games, and now and again wonder if my diet of simulated violence is entirely healthy.

Lately, though, I've been struggling with how to deal with my encounters with rather more concrete forms of gaming evil, namely, human beings. When you play online, you encounter all manner of blighted souls, and filtered through the medium of a game, it's a bit difficult to know how to respond to them.

I've played a little bit of a free online game called UMAG (follow the link, and you'll lose a few hours. You've been warned). It's a turn-based artillery game, in which folks fire shells at one another whilst texting comments that appear in little thought bubbles above your tank. It's simple. It's goofy. It's fun. Or it usually is.

Two nights ago, as I dropped into a game, the guy in position to strike at me texted the following to those around him:

[sumbuddy help me kill this Jew]

Suddenly, the game wasn't fun at all. With two Jewish boys and a Jewish wife and an extended Jewish family that I love more than I love myself, that kind of hatred tends to evoke a blind rage response. I took the guy out, of course, digging him into a hole and then dropping a MIRV on him. But that wasn't satisfactory. That sort of thing goes far beyond smacktalk, and into a dark place where play is no longer possible.

That was not the end of this week's online encounters with antisemitism. Last night, as I played through the delightfully frenetic FPS Battlefield: Bad Company 2, I found myself face to face with an opposing player whose avatar was named JEWSLAYER14.

Again, I took him out, with a fusillade of well placed rounds from the main gun of my BMD3 light tank. But again, that wasn't enough. Things were no longer fun. Someone who would choose that for their online identity is a person with whom I can't play, or have conversation. They are the Enemy, in a very spiritual way.

Electronic Arts, which publishes the Bad Company series, makes a point of booting such folks from their servers. Their Terms Of Service explicitly state that hate speech will get you thrown out...but folks like that still pop up. My hope is that my second encounter doesn't have 13 friends, but is number 14 because they've been kicked 13 times.

It does raise several conundrums about confronting virtual evil. First, it's very easy for evil to hide and reform and resurface on the interwebs. Removing a user for TOS violations is no more effective than deleting a spam email. They'll be back, with a different and equally offensive name, spitting out the same hatred they were before. There, I think folks in the gaming community are responsible for enforcing a community ethic. If someone goes beyond mocking you for your pathetic noobness and is expressing racial hatred, they're ruining the game for those around them. Gamers need not to tolerate that in their online friends, and if you're hosting a server and encounter someone who is eager to engage in pointless hatred, ban or block or kick them.

The difficulty comes with point number two. The "gaming community" is a pretty wildly diverse place. I've been on servers in the online game Warhawk, for instance, where everyone is screaming in Arabic, and the gamertags are things like jihad4ever1972. My suspicion is that a gamer with a tag like JEWSLAYER14 might not be booted from such a server.

Here, the question becomes how deeply a for-profit entity is willing to stand by the values of the culture from which it springs. The deep hatreds that have lead to such horrors in the meatspace world should be resisted wherever we encounter them.

If Electronic Arts and Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo put serious effort into keeping their games...you know...games...then gaming will remain a playground on which we can have all kinds of fun.