On April 20, 2010, Transocean’s Deep Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, leased to BP, exploded and sank to the ocean bottom. The well this rig was pumping oil out of is now leaking tens of thousands of gallons of oil into the ocean each day. According to a September 3, 2009 Newsweek article, this rig sat atop the deepest vertical well ever drilled, going down through 4,132 feet of water and another 30,923 feet below the sea floor. Despite attempts to put a stop to the leakage, it could be days or weeks before the oil that is pouring into the Gulf of Mexico can be stopped.

I am writing this down with the sincere hope that this is not news to you. If you have heard about it, it won’t hurt to hear it one more time. If you don’t know about it already, you need to.

If you know me personally, have ever read one of my commentaries or even just read the title of my column, you already know what I think of “Drill, baby, drill!” And you probably have already formed an assumption of what this commentary is going to be about.

So I could do as expected and come up with plenty of numbers, facts, statistics, expert opinions and scientific studies that show why offshore drilling is a bad idea. I could bring up the ecological destruction of sensitive ocean and shoreline habitats. I could describe pictures of cute and cuddly ducks covered in oil while selfless and determined volunteers tediously scrub the oil from their feathers.

I could rattle off the number of human lives lost in accidents. (This particular incident killed eleven.)

I could talk about lobbying by big oil companies and the horrid evils of oil monopolies ruling the actions of our government. I could talk about peak oil—estimates of when it will occur and the effects it will have on our way of life—and why this is evidence of the need to shift away from dependence on oil.

I could go on and on. But I’m sure you’ve heard it all.

And even if I did ramble on with all of this, it probably wouldn’t change your opinion anyway.

You probably already have your own place on one side or the other of the oil divide. Your mind is made up. There is no way that reading an 845 word commentary full of random evidence in a small school newspaper will convince you to switch over to the other team.

No simple argument about this can win followers because this issue has become convoluted by a cloud of political and economic rhetoric. This means that any discussion about it typically dissolves into emotional appeals based in no truth at all, but our own deeply seated personal biases. Even if we could disregard our own biases, we can never really wrap our minds around the scope of what we are doing. At the bottom of this problem lies the horrifying truth that we have created a world in which the consequences of our actions are so removed in space and time from our own existence that they are far beyond what we can comprehend or understand. We undertake massive projects that drastically alter our world with no foresight or long-term planning and without understanding what will really come of it. We say “That bad thing could never happen, so we’re not going to plan for it.” Then, when something actually does go wrong, we throw our hands in the air, screaming, “Oh shit! Who is going to take care of this?! Someone had better clean this up!”

Everyone keeps asking who is responsible, and who will pay for this mess. The fact that we are even wondering who is responsible is hilarious to me. We are all responsible. Just existing as an American is enough to make someone responsible for this disaster. You are responsible and so am I. No matter how much I justify it by saying that I rarely drive, I still own a car. I buy groceries that are most of the time shipped from hundreds of miles away. I cook that food on a gas stove (granted it is natural gas, but this still is a fossil fuel that comes from similar conditions as oil). Therefore, I depend on gasoline. I am supporting the industry that created this leak as much as any other person.

All I’m going to say is that I sincerely hope, and yet highly doubt, that this can be an experience we can learn from. I’m just going to write this commentary with no hope of changing your opinion, or offering some nugget of wisdom to make you think in a new way or creating a powerful scathing argument for either side that makes you incensed enough to do something about your beliefs. I just want to make sure you know that it happened. You don’t need me to tell you what to think about it, because I’m sure you’ve already figured it out for yourself.