I don't know if you know it or not, but that statement is positively true.
I never gave it much thought. I'm 38 and I am starting to realize that there are far too many things that I have never given too much thought to.
Oil is a lipid, literally. A fat. It is hydrophobic and thus, again literally, scared of water. It cannot mix with it, cannot blend with it and exist again as oil. Oil and water do not mix.
How can this be? Water mixes with and exists in nearly everything. Man cannot live without water, cannot survive for more than a handful of days without it. Water is everywhere and water is the most crucial substance (aside from one of it's chemical components, Mr. Oxygen) on the planet. And if you told me there was a creature, a plant, a living or non-living organism that could not bear to be near water, I would laugh (after giving it some thought).
Now, I could spend some time on Wiki and find other things that water does not mix with, like Gore Tex and the Wicked Witch of the West, but none of them could be as important as oil.
I am not going to spend too much time on the current cost of a gallon of gasoline to prove my point, nor will I drag the Iraqi war, Presidential election and impending Iranian and Russian crises into this post to serve that point either. Though any of them are fodder for much debate and illustrative of my current mindset, they are too plain and require a more political debate. I choose instead to draw the strangeness of this oil/water dispute in a parallel to Valentino Achak Deng and Omar al-Bashir.
God talks to me in many ways. He opens my eyes to things and then I see them for the 300th time and the first time, all at once. Dave Eggers and my Mom helped me see this one.
I was mowing my yard today and thinking of how strange it was to own a plot of land, small as it is, in the middle of Kansas City, Missouri in conjunction with Wells Fargo bank. They have agreed to pay for this plot of land and let me pay them back for the better part of my life if all goes well, and ask in return that I not be late with payments. Beyond that, they could care less what I do. I can paint the walls red or blue or fuscia or knock them down with a sledgehammer and rebuild them. I can install tile or laminate flooring to collect my dog's hair. I can put 6 tons of gravel on the outside perimeter up to the property and easement lines and spray 20 gallons of Roundup each season to keep it weed free and rocky; or I can mow. Twice a week. Bag it, clip it and trim it. Edge it and water it and feed it and weed it and look at it and preen and slave to it. Then, when I least expect it, I can be in the middle of taking care of this lawn, and I can run out of gas.
I'll write another story some day about owning a house and maintaining a yard, for whom and why we do it, but for now, that will have to serve as my segue...
I am dependant on gas to keep my yard looking nice. I need gas to power my car to drive me to the gas station to get more gas for my mower. I do not like needing gas.
Gas comes from oil, and oil is a drug we are slaves to as humans. We've created this dependancy and I'm certain we can break it, as is so hip to want to do these days. But I find it interesting that two of the things we covet the most in this world are oil and water.
I recently finished Dave Eggers' What is the What, a semi-biographical account of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee living in America. It recounts the horror of the Sudan civil war, the Lost Boys marching across a continent to escape sure death and torture at the hands of a violent regime, and his struggles to find his heart throughout the turmoil of being a castoff wherever he was in life (including the States). I bring this up because the book was written 5 years ago, the atrocities began when I was in grade school, and all of it has been front page news to everyone except me.
I knew next to nothing about Sudan. Even less than nothing about al-Bashir. I am ashamed about that fact, but so happy for it to no longer be the truth.
In the story, Valentino is orphaned along with thousands of other boys and left to fend for themselves together in a long marching line of death through the arid conditions in Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya. One of things they need most is water. Too many die of starvation and dehydration on their journey. But when rain falls, it falls hard. Boys drink from puddles and live in mosquito infested marshes and die of malaria and dysentery.
What they need most, they don't need too much of.
It's a great book and one you should read, but the kicker of my tale is this...At the crux of the warfare and violence that forced these boys to travel for months and then only to live in refugee camps after witnessing the slaughter of their families was oil.
The territorial fight for oil that was discovered under their herding grounds became more precious to al-Bashir than the thousands of people he murdered to get rights to it.
It's the same tribal fight we see in the Middle East.
Bottom line. As humans, we need water. We only want oil.
I really hope we don't try too hard get too much more than we need, because the effects of too much are the same as standing in a puddle of standing water.
