Count To Fifty

Drive yourself down your local freeway, which, if you're an average Elk Grovian you do so 2.3 times daily, and if you're lucky enough to be driving sans traffic, count to fifty.

The distance you drove is the depth of that busted wellhead on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Now, that doesn't seem so deep, does it? No. You comfortably drive 5,000' in under a minute using 1/22nd of a gallon of gasoline that costs you about 14 cents. You cruise to your destination, be it for work, to go home, or for play while the leak continues and you could give a rat's ass about the leak, some 2,300 miles distant. It might as well be Nigeria, you tell yourself, and continue comfortably to your destination.

So long as gasoline is only 14 cents per mile, well, why ought you concern yourself? There's no oil production anywhere near here, nothing to pollute by its extraction (only it's burning), and the GoM is so unimportant to the Elk Grovian economy that it means absolutely nothing. Nothing.

I say we ought to just accept said accidents as the cost of keeping our costs under 14 cents each mile.