If memory serves, and it is an imperfect agent in these matters, I have purchased gas from an Exxon service station twice since the Exxon Valdez began spewing oil all over Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989.
In both cases, I was at the end of a gas tank on sparsely populated roads, and without choices.
Just now I looked up at the sign where I was filling up my little red farm truck, and realized I was at my friendly neighborhood BP station.
Well, now...
For better and mostly worse, I'm a guy who can hold a grudge. A hair over 50 (or hairless and over 50), and I've never once had a McDonald's hamburger. Not once. Now, in fairness, I have eaten their fake chicken nuggest a couple times in hours of need, and sometimes on long trips we get our daughter soft serve ice cream (only it's not ice cream, is it?) cones there, or, occasionally, yogurt parfaits. But never a hamburger.
This is mostly because I was a picky eater as a child, and McD's wouldn't take all that garbage off their burger, or, if they did, it took so long as to be past embarrassing. Later it has come to be slightly more a political stand: Fast food is an international evil, and so I choose not to patronize this particular flagship brand.
See, I understand contemporary democracy principally as an exchange of monies. I mean, let's be honest: every political organization to which I "belong" (which is to say, every group which has my e-mail address) loves me only as a potential donor. None of them really care what my opinion on any given subject might be, so long as they can rile me enough to open my pocketbook. (Which they can't. Blood from stone.)
The democracy which matters in this country just now has to do with where you spend your money. I don't shop at WalMart. We live in a small town, and it's inconvenient not to shop at WalMart. But the presence of that store has ruined our local economy, and its new location has exacerbated watershed issues to the point where roads are in danger of blowing out. And all the other reasons one might find enumerated here.
And so, because Exxon was a party to ruining a beautiful shoreline, and did so with legendarily bad public relations, I refuse to shop at their stores. Makes my wife crazy. Truth is, I've never even been to Alaska, though I was friends growing up with enough guys who fished or crabbed or worked cannery gigs to pay for college up there that I think I have a few borrowed emotional memories of the place. Not to mention the photographs.
We've had our own issues this last month. Water, mostly, which doesn't agree much with books, and we happen to own an independent bookstore. But I am not unaware of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Here's what I think I know: I think that the Bush Administration went lax on safety regulations and BP got away with substandard (or at least not state of the art) equipment; I think that environmentalists have opposed this kind of drilling for years just because these kinds of events were inevitable; I think that our need for oil supersedes every other possible consideration (same with coal, and I live now in a coal state); I think BP is doing a tolerable job spinning the PR, that they're spending a gilded fortune trying to stop the flow; I'm pretty sure that the fisheries (and tourist industries) in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana are screwed for the foreseeable future. And I'm curious that in none of my very casual reading have I seen the word "Mexico" even mentioned. It's like this is our problem, and the hell with the rest of the world. (Which is the American way, I suppose.)
So there I am pouring BP gas into the little red truck. I don't go to that station often. It would be easy not to patronize it. I'm not even sure there is an Exxon station in town (though, doubtless, one or more of the indies is getting Exxon gas anyhow, and we just don't know about it), but there will be the next time we go down the road somewhere. I'm pretty sure the damage BP is doing in the Gulf of Mexico, whether or not it's legally culpable (or should be, even) is far worse, far more damaging to fragile ecosystems and even more fragile economies, than the damage the Valdez did to Prince William Sound.
What, then? Do I boycott both? Let it go, just buy the cheapest gas I can find, like everybody else does?
There have to be consequences. I keep coming back to that.
Your opinion, then, is solicited. (But no matter what, I ain't eating that hamburger. If that's really what it is.)