BP

I have heard a million opinions on the BP oil spill. And to add to the mix I want to share my thoughts.

First of all it is a tragedy. The animals and wildlife that will be hurt or killed is devastating. The people who are losing their livelihood as a result of the spill is devastating. The fisherman who cannot fish and small town bait shops and such that cannot sell are truly heartbreaking. It is sad and awful. But it was an accident. I have no idea why or how it happened. I am sure when the smoke clears we will find out some very technical thing that went wrong that caused this tragic accident. It was most likely some sort of human error. But that is the human element. We are imperfect and make mistakes. Someone screwed up. And someone screwed up big time.

I do, however, think that in the wake of this tragedy BP has handled themselves well. I do not think they were perfect. The CEO clearly made some rough comments in the beginning. But they are committed to cleaning up this mess. They could have walked away. They could have broken the lease and walked away and said this was the government's mess. They did not. They chose to stay and devote man power to fixing it.

So as Christians, I think our response should be to pray for them. We should pray for the leak to be fixed quickly and for the people in charge to have wisdom to fix this mess. And I think we should buy BP gasoline. I have heard people call for a boycott on BP stations. I think it is riciculus
BP does not make the majority of their revenue from BP stations anyway. If you boycott your local BP station the only people that will suffer will be your local BP franchise holder. A local small business person. That is who will suffer. A small business owner who is trying to feed their family and pay their bills. Is it their fault? And in all honesty now is not the time for a boycott. I seem to get this sense from some people that simply because BP makes a lot of money they are evil. I do not think BP intentionally spilled tons of oil into the ocean. Can we seriously believe that? Does anyone really? Someone made a mistake and it was probably not the CEO. It was probably some midlevel employee working to feed his family and pay his mortgage. Someone certainly made a big mess.

We can choose to hate BP and not shop at BP stations. We can, but I really don't think it will hurt BPs bottom line. In the end we will only be hurting someone like ourselves. We can choose forgiveness and work towards a solution. That would be far better.

And also I think we still need to keep drilling. We are dependent on oil for our way of life. Do we need to find a better way? Absolutely. But in the mean time I do not like the idea of being completely dependant upon the Middle east for our very way of life. Aren't these the very people who have flown planes into our buildings and killed thousands of American citizens. Now I know not every person in the Middle East is a terrorist. But how do we know who we can trust? How do we know that some terrorist group will not infiltrate our oil supply? It seems to me that we have branded the wrong bad guys.