E is for Enough Already

Facebook and Twitter and all of these social media portals have opened up a new realm of possibilities for all sorts of things. You can meet old friends you had when you were six and lived in another state. You can converse with celebrities when in real life, you'd get fish hooked by a bodyguard for trying to look in their general direction. Heck, you can even become a pretend farmer on some dumb game app and then go tweet about how you saved your cow from a barbed wire fence. One thing that is has also done is open up a HUGE, WIDE box of tissues for every complainer and whiner in the universe. I don't do well with either one.

I don't like whiners and complainers for one simple reason: THEY ACCOMPLISH NOTHING. I'm a do-er kinda gal. I get high on efficiency. Complainer containers are the complete opposite of this mantra. The major complaint that is really irking me right now is the BP oil disaster. No one is arguing that this is completely awful. It's ruined an entire region ecologically, economically and socially. Complainers, however, sit around and flappin their lips about how evil the oil and gas corporations are and how its the fault of the rich BP CEO. But really, this could have happened to any of the oil corporations we employ. They use man-made equipment and human-designed processes to get oil out of the ground, so bottom line- it's destined to fail. Which means we have to come up with man-made ideas to resolve said catastrophes. This calamity occurred and guess what- it'll happen again. That's a fact. So do the complainers contribute ideas on how to fix it? Do they assist in the clean up or even give a dime to help environmental groups with the mess? Of course not. Then you've got the whiners who are the blamers. "Let's blame it on BP, no, the President. Wait- blame it on the former President. We've got that down pat. This is all an dubious plot for money makers to make more money." Where does the blame really lie? I believe it lies directly in the hands of you and me.

We, and especially the complainers and whiners, don't want to have to get up off the couch to turn on the DVD player, so we just leave it on standby. We don't want to plug the phone charger back in tonight before bed- that's a hassle. Leave it stuck in the wall, charging nothing all day. Who wants to wait sixty seconds for your computer to power up? Hibernate it, baby. I love the wind in my hair, so let's take a drive just for the hell of it, instead of using up those useless calories we drank last night and getting some exercise on our bikes. And heaven forbid you must wait five minutes for your house to be arctic freezing cold when you get home. Make sure you run that air conditioner ALL DAY LONG. We are the problem. Did you know that if any of your electronic devices has any sort of LED light on it, it can pull up to 70% of it's active load even though your not using it? Yeah, like that red light on your hair straightener after you turn it off. They have a ten dollar tester at your local Radio Shack if you don't believe me. In the U.S. we are fat and wasteful. That's why everyone hates us. We have no respect for what it takes to live. Why the crap are we drilling so much? Because we use so much. Correction- we waste so much. If we weren't so dang careless, we wouldn't be in this mess.

If you don't like what's happening int the Gulf, remedy your part in the blame. Program your thermostat, unplug your crap, use less stuff. It's as simple as that. For the complainers and whiners, check yourself. Make sure you understand how much drilling costs and how much life-threatening work goes into keeping your flapping face cheeks cooled off. Be aware of the countless hours and extraordinary intelligence it takes to get your car one block to the Quik Trip for yet another high-calorie coke in that petroleum-based cup in your hand. And before you continue nagging about how no one is doing anything, I dare you to even try to come up with an idea on how to fix it while good people like my friend Lisa work two shifts a day managing the relief well being built and actually doing an enormous amount to get this situation fixed. Make sure you pitch-in before you start your bitch-in.