Even if the Well is Sealed, We Must Never Forget What BP Has Done

U.S. officials today declared BP’s leaking Macondo 252 well in the Gulf of Mexico ‘dead’ after confirming the success of the last cementing procedure to seal the well.

The well may be dead and that’s certainly good news. But it is imperative we never forget what has occurred in the Gulf of Mexico and that we never let BP ever try to slip back through the collective cracks of media/public forgetfulness through slick public relations and advertising campaigns. It is imperative we do not allow them to buy forgetfulness (or forgiveness) by spending millions on TV commercials with music purchased from old rock stars who are selling off their protest anthems to recapture some market share.

Do not forget — even if BP comes up with a shiny new logo that screams “good citizenship.”

Do not forget — even if BP changes its corporate name.

Do not forget — even if BP gives money to charities to try and win back public approval (“see, we help babies, don’t we — that means we must be a good company”).

Do not forget — even when BP blogs and tweets and farts to try and keep “public engagement” going.

Do not forget — even as dispersants sink the worst of the mess below the surface in an “out of site, out of mind” maneuver.

Do not forget — that BP is simply the unluckiest company involved in the world’s oil mess: it got caught. There are others who will duck for cover and point fingers, but that doesn’t make them better than BP … and that should scare us.

Do not forget — even when you want to, because forgetting history does indeed doom us to repeat it.

And any time you are tempted to start thinking nicely about BP again (or any of those lousy Bush-era bureaucrats who allowed themselves to be shamelessly lobbied by oil company pimps) just watch this video called Black Tears: The Saddest Video in the World. Here’s what the person who made the video said:

“This is the saddest video I ever made,” wrote piwacket of the YouTube channel Cranial Pressure. ” I cried through the whole thing and will probably never watch it again. Crude oil has been GUSHING into our Gulf at the rate of 800,000 gallons per day.”

The well is dead. So are a lot of other things. Let’s not forget.

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