There is almost a week's worth of dirty dishes on my kitchen countertop. It'll pile up a little longer (at least a coffee cup I'm using right now), but this mess will get cleaned up. I have redundant back-up systems. My ability to "not see" the problem fades as the spill of dishes gets bigger. And, eventually, I'll run out of clean dishes. This situation will not take until mid-August to (maybe) fix. It will, at worst, go on for one more day.

No wildlife anyone really cares about was harmed in this obvious comparison to the horrific oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But I did spray for roaches and ants a week or so ago, and I have been finding dead ones around the apartment on occasion.

I'll be honest, I didn't think about this oil spill hardly at all for a few weeks. Maybe a month, I'm not sure. I don't live in the area (although I spent a long hot summer in St. Petersburg, Florida, which is on the gulf). I don't own oil stocks. I wasn't reading the paper on a daily basis when it occurred. But I'm pretty sure there wasn't a ton of coverage about this at the beginning.

It wasn't like a nuclear power plant blew up. The toxicity of something like that is immediate. And then you have a dead zone.

I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but we might have created the largest dead zone on earth with this one. Hurricanes haven't stopped people from living on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, but having a tar pit for a body of water might. Say goodbye to gulf shrimp and crawfish. And pretty much anything else that lives there.

This is an interesting disaster we've got. It doesn't follow our usual laws of disaster management. Or public reaction. Everyone's in a tizzy, but for different reasons.

If you have an earthquake, hurricane, tornado or flood, the effects are mostly localized. Ditto terrorist attacks. And these can be claimed as acts of god (or, in terrorist attacks, acts of disciples of some god). We know what to do with these things. There will be charity concerts. Telethons. 800 numbers. Tons of relief food, personnel and money will pour into the area. People will die, but usually the body count is immediate with a few lingering after effect deaths. All of these are contained and the bad thing stops being a force almost immediately.

This was no act of a pissed off god. This was carelessness and greed of a multi-national corporation. And, in the eyes of the U.S. constitution (thank you Supreme Court), this means it was an act of an individual.

BP, which bribes many a public official in our country, is completely to blame. This individual should be strung up by its toes, stripped naked, dipped in the oily water and made to beg the world for its forgiveness.

But it's not really an individual, is it? It's a corporation. And I keep asking this question, "Has anyone been fired for this?"

I know a lot of people are mad at Obama for this, but he can't do much about it. And, if you are going to blame him, better look in the mirror, folks. But then, nobody likes to do that.

Did you chant along to "Drill Baby Drill?" It's your fault.
Did you agree that a $20 billion dollar escrow fund for victims of this tragedy was a "shakedown"? Your fault.
Did you vote for candidates for public office who took money from oil companies to make sure they didn't have to follow safety regulations? Your fault.
Do you still own a car that runs on gas? Yep, we're all in this people.

Is this a call for alternative energy sources? Yes it is. Whatever we can do to stop the profitability of companies drilling increasingly dangerous oil wells in sensitive areas would be great. And, by the way, the relief wells they are drilling to try and fix this "leak" are really dangerous. If it works, great. If not, then we're completely fucked.

Do you think wind turbines and solar panels are "unsightly"? Check out the gulf beaches and spreading slick. I'm thinking that's a little more unsightly.

Do you think you need a gas guzzling SUV to commute by yourself to work? Why? Are you living in a war zone?

Do you think we need to protect our borders from people coming from down south to look for a better life? We've got brown beaches on our south end now, and it has nothing to do with illegals.

If I'm overstating the end result of this ongoing (and there's no end in sight, people) unnatural disaster, I'll apologize. But I think we're gonna find out that we're gonna pay pretty dearly for shitting in our own backyard.

Matt Worley feels pretty helpless about this, and that means it's his fault, too.