Is that all there is?

i'm fully aware how immature and catty this is going to sound, but this is my blog, not Glenn Mr. Maturity Beck's. One of the things i have enjoyed about living in Baku is that whenever i come across a swarthy Texan clad in layers of NorthFace garments, i ask if he works in the oil industry and the response i get is always as follows: he will hang his head, penitently nod and then look me shamefully n the eyes and say, "Yes, I work for BP... but I'm an engineer". The professional qualifier is evidently supposed to induce some level of sympathy, help me understand that not being here to drain the Caspian's reserves (adding billions to BP's coffers) would be a waste of his education and brilliant mind, or render him and his family destitute or victims of some other Ayn Rand nightmare. The main thing is that these guys are all clearly ashamed of BP which - especially after the Horizon disaster last year - they should be. For the first time in my life, oil men are not admonishing me for being uninformed and reactionary; i could get used to that.

Now to get catty and rancorous. This morning i received an email from the Gulf Restoration Network that may place me on the wrong side of this equation, drinking beer with the BP engineers - or karmically worse. Here's what they have to say to me on the anniversary of the Horizon explosion:

You don't have to go to great lengths to play an important role in reminding the nation that a year after the BP deepwater drilling disaster, the Gulf still needs the nation's support. I was out in the wetlands yesterday with an out-of-work oyster fishermen, and I can tell you the oil is still here. Unfortunately, Congress hasn't passed a single bill to restore or protect the Gulf after BP dumped over 200 million gallons of oil into our nation's energy sacrifice zone.

You want to do something though, don't you? Here are two simple things you can do for the Gulf right now—without even leaving your desktop.

1) Update your status on Facebook and Twitter to voice the call for Gulf recovery. Sample text: 1 year ago the worst oil disaster in U.S. history began. BP’s oil is still here! Help restore the Gulf at http://bpdrillingdisaster.org.

Make sure to link to http://bpdrillingdisaster.org.

2) Change your Facebook and Twitter image to the PeliCAN design on the right to draw attention to BP's on-going disaster in the Gulf. Just save the image to your computer and upload it to your social media profiles.

Having vowed to not use facebook this week and still sparing myself the hashtag inundations of twitter, you can immediately see the oil and water quandry GRN has placed me in. I cannot change my profile picture to a pelican. i cannot update my status to admonishing the US Congress. i cannot flood my friends' walls with horrific pictures of dead dolphins, blackened beaches, and stories of out-of-work Gulf fisherman. In short, not using facebook today puts me squarely in the ranks of the apathetic, the inactive, the oil industry doormats.

Am i wrong to feel sickened by this? If not sickened, then disheartened? i get that an augmentation of collective rage can be societally powerful, though i'm not sure if rage can exist in any real sense when manifest in the form of bytes and pixels. Call me naive, call me arrogant, call me a techno neophyte, i really don't care. It's not so much the use of these mediums that disturbs me but the fact that activism is now so focused on them. i'm definitely yearning for those old school, cut & paste flyers, surround the offices of Chevron days. But hey, whatever makes the Gulf activists feel better is ok, they're the ones living directly in the aftermath. i just hope for their sakes that facebook and twitter are not all there is.