“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed”
                                             -   Mahatma Gandhi

The corporate greed littering the twenty-first century landscape can only be rivaled by that demonstrated by the robber barons of the late 1800’s.  But even those businessmen and bankers who dominated industry and amassed huge personal fortunes, typically by anti-competitive or unfair business practices, had nothing on the perverse audacity of the current crop of corporate criminals. 

The key tenet preached at the Church of the Bottom Line is that profit is everything.  The Church teaches there is no tempering grace that must be observed in pursuit of the Almighty Dollar – no social responsibility, no environmental safeguards and, above all, no compassion.  The sole means by which corporations can attain Eternal Grace is by building a gargantuan balance sheet that will enable the select few heads of the corporation to make off with obscene quantities of wealth wrested from the hands of the more Common People.

The latest evidence of corporate criminality is, of course, the BP oil spill.  The apocalyptic vision of this self-wrought hell, the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history, is the creeping ooze of black, ungodly wall of unstoppable darkness slowly, inexorably invading the pristine waters and the majestic shorelines of the Gulf of Mexico.  Before the summer is out, it will be making its way up the Atlantic seaboard.  The fantastic, reeking horror of this manifestation of Black Death visited on the environment by BP is spreading like a fast-growing cancer into the liquid womb of Mother Nature herself.

It’s not just the incredible photographs of the spill that are, in turns, heartbreaking, stunning, otherworldly and downright Satanic in their abject revulsion.  It is not the statistics that tell us how many millions of gallons might ultimately be spilled.  Nor is it the frightening horror of just how this unprecedented catastrophe might affect the fragile food chain and distress the ocean’s ecosystems at their very root levels.

The heart wrenching tales of livelihoods lost, industries destroyed, coastlines ravaged and wildlife killed are enough to poison the soul for as long as we wish to wallow in that murky state of fatalism and doom.  The picture is nothing but bleak.

But the most disturbing reality comes when we begin to understand that, at a very core level, we all have a shared responsibility in the creation of the foul demon that has been unleashed because of our rapacious need for cheap, endless energy.  The monster we have released is of a scale and proportion we can barely even fathom and would do justice to any of the Beasts described in Revelations.

If we are honest, no matter our politics, our religion, our income level or our mode of transport, we must see this beast of creeping death and begin to understand that is us.  The spill is many things, but more than anything else it is a giant, horrifying reflection of the cancer of corporate greed we have refused to cut from the body politic.

For this disaster, we cannot blame an “act of God,” as we would for a hurricane or a tsunami inflicted upon meager humankind by an angry deity who decides to punish us for being too war-like, too violent or, perhaps, too naïve.  This is not a retribution in which He suddenly decided He’d better kill some of us lest we forget who’s in charge.

This is not a 9/11 for which we can blame terrorists.  The situation in the Gulf is not the result of a coven of foreigners who spout hatred of our Satanic ways while secretly envying our Hummers and McDonald’s.  Nor can we blame the spill on some nefarious conspiracy secretly wrought by devious agents in black helicopters designed to destabilize the world’s economy and induce universal mind control — unless, of course, you’re getting a little desperate and don’t get out much, in which case, you absolutely can.

Surprisingly, we have yet to hear Pat Robertson or any of his cult of apocalypticans blame the gays, or voodoo, or Islam, or reality TV for what’s happening in the Gulf.  Nor have TV evangelists sent out the message that if we send them vast contributions they will be able to persuade God to stop the Black Death coming from the floor of the Gulf.  But then, oil is completely non-denominational.  It mocks all religions equally — except, of course, the only one that really matters to the corporate criminals, capitalism.

That this is one of the more universally damning disasters of our time is evidenced by the simple fact that no one really seems to know how to respond to it.  Right Wing Imperialists are abandoning Sarah, Queen of “Duh,” Palin’s “drill baby, drill” mantra faster than rats departing the Titanic.  And just as suddenly, the incessant Republican wails for more oil exploration, more drilling, more tax cuts for oil conglomerates are beginning to reek of death and destruction, the likes of which the country has never seen.

At the same time, hardcore Leftists are demanding the immediate imprisonment and/or execution of every BP employee worldwide, as though BP is somehow different from any other oil titan currently engaged in raping the planet.  Hardcore lefties would appreciate Obama’s using the disaster as a surefire excuse to instantly change the entire course of energy history by immediately shutting down every off shore oil well, handing every American a bicycle and installing solar panels in the Whitehouse.

The problem, of course, is that, as surely as oxygen is necessary for our survival, oil is woven into every aspect of American life.  A full 30 percent of domestic transportation fuel comes from the Gulf and shutting down a fraction of those wells would further devastate our already battered economy.  Petroleum and coal power the very energy plants that deliver the electricity that charges our iPhones, through which, of course, everyone can Tweet angry complaints decrying the government’s failure to have Jack Bauer don a wet suit, dive into the Gulf and, single-handedly, stop the filth spewing from the hole we punched in the ocean floor.

The lesson to be learned here is that BP is behaving no better, or worse, than any other corporate spawn of Satan would in a similar situation.  Anyone who doesn’t think every oil company on earth is right now kneeling before Beelzebub in gratitude that it wasn’t one of their own wells that exploded hasn’t been paying attention.

That said, one has to ask, is it possible to begin to think our darkest disaster in a generation could somehow ultimately improve our attitudes, change our behavior and begin to put the brakes on our violent treatment of the planet?  As someone recently noted, the BP spill isn’t Obama’s Katrina so much as it should be Big Oil’s Chernobyl.  If we have any sense at all of social and environmental responsibility, a disaster so appalling and devastating should alter forever the way in which the oil industry is managed and put our energy policy on the course it should have taken beginning in 1973.

But, are we even capable of such a shift?  Is there any silver lining to be found in the black and grease spreading across the Gulf?  Perhaps the most imperative question of all is, if we can produce a demon of such extraordinary scale and devastation, can we not also somehow create its exact opposite?  And can we use what has happened in the Gulf as a learning experience alerting us to the dangers posed by preying, unchecked corporate greed?