COMMENTARY: We’re all in this together

(RNS) Pope Benedict XVI could not have predicted the heartbreak in the Gulf of Mexico when he wrote his World Day of Peace Message for 2010, “If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation.” Still, his words now hit home in the combined mistakes and insensitivity of mega-corporation British Petroleum and the disaster unfolding in […]

(RNS) Pope Benedict XVI could not have predicted the heartbreak in the Gulf of Mexico when he wrote his World Day of Peace Message for 2010, “If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation.”

Still, his words now hit home in the combined mistakes and insensitivity of mega-corporation British Petroleum and the disaster unfolding in the Gulf.

I am no scientist, but what happened seems pretty clear: BP drilled an oil well in mile-deep water and something broke. Now hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil and methane gas pump 24/7 into some of the Unites States’ most beautiful and life-filled waters.


We are watching, nightly, the destruction of creation, which Benedict points out is “God’s gift to humanity (that) helps us understand our vocation and worth as human beings.”

And it’s not only the fish, the wildlife, and the beaches. It is the violent assault on all of us through the actions of a corporation whose titular head, a Ph.D. geologist named Tony Hayward, wanted to call it quits 40 days into the disaster.

As most of the planet knows, Hayward wanted to “get his life back.” On Sunday (June 20), he was spotted sailing around the Isle of Wight on a boat named “Bob.” Yet somehow he couldn’t make a major oil industry meeting in London the next day.

Then, of course, there is BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg (a Swede, not a Brit), who said his company really cares about the “small people.” Svanberg presumably meant to speak about the “ordinary folks” or the “working people” whose lives have been trashed by BP, but he smashed another insult into every one of us.

So, now the U.S. is held hostage once again by a band of Brits — to their incompetence, their PR gaffes, and their perceived uncaring attitude toward Americans who depend on the Gulf of Mexico. By extension, that is every single citizen.

Who is our hostage negotiator? President Obama, who refused help from a score or more foreign countries that offered equipment to clean up the mess. Some offers were accepted. The rest are “under review,” probably because the circa-1920 “Jones Act” keeps non-U.S. ships and workers from plying American waters. Other nations wanted to help. Why didn’t the president suspend the Jones Act?


The interdependence of the planet — of every human and of all creation — is a mainstay of Catholic teaching. What’s more, the U.S. is bound to just about every other country in the world by trade, climate, computers, and the international monetary system. But now the U.S. is suddenly so independent?

The Fourth of July is “Independence Day,” but the U.S. got so much help from other countries during the Revolution that perhaps we should have called it “Interdependence Day.” When France and Spain offered help, George Washington did not decline. Nor were Irish-born volunteers turned away from the Continental Army. Luckily, we won that one.

The Gulf disaster is more difficult, and more insidious. Do the players understand that we’re all in this together? There are no national boundaries, no boundaries of class and stature. There is only continued destruction of God’s creation, of God’s gratuitous gift to everyone.

This Independence Day, let’s remember how we got to the Fourth of July in the first place. A little interdependence goes a long way.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)

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