I should be studying right now because I have an exam tomorrow, but I need to rant because I’m so angry and so sad that I hardly know what else to do.

Someone gave me a link today of pictures of some of the birds caught up in the oil in the gulf. Just beware before you look at these, because they are devastating, they are tragic. They are a perfect example of why we all should be angry right now.

Today, Sarah Palin blamed the oil spill on “extreme environmentalists” because they moved the drilling away from “safer” areas and into the gulf. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think that there’s such a thing as a safe place to drill oil anymore. I also struggle to watch the same woman who chanted “Drill Baby Drill” point the finger for the oil spill on the people who opposed it the most. But I know that my feelings are not universal.

People have turned the finger on Obama for reasons I don’t yet understand. I’m not sure what he can do seeing as how he is a lawyer, a politician but not a physicist or geologist or oceanographer. I’d like to think that if he had the answer, he would’ve given it already. I do hope that he makes BP pay for this, but none of us yet know how that will unfold, and until then, I choose to give him and his administration the benefit of the doubt. Again, I know that my feeling is anything but universal.

And then there’s BP. A company who cut corners, who cost the lives of several of their own workers and now animals, and the marshes in and around the gulf. A company who hired workers to pretend to clean up beaches for the President’s arrival. A company who hasn’t given masks to the workers who are there cleaning, for fear of damage to their image, meanwhile, the workers are getting sick. A company who I think a lot of us would like to see in a court with their pockets bleeding from all the money they have to pay for this.

There are a lot of players in this tragedy. And when you think about it, maybe that list of players includes us and our dependence on oil.

I don’t know who’s to blame for this (though, if I’m being honest, I’d really love to put it all on Palin), but the thing is, we can worry about blame later. We cannot worry about these animals later. We cannot worry about the livelihood of families that are multi-generation fishers later. We cannot worry about the wetlands, the fragile ecosystems, our ocean, our planet later.

We must worry about them now.

It would be so satisfying to get the head of BP to stand up and face us, to face all of us who are angry, who are heartbroken, and try to explain themselves, but what would it achieve? Where would that get us? It would get us no where. Oil would still be gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, oil would still be killing animals and wetlands and harming the lives of fishermen in the Gulf.

And so here comes the hard part. What can we do?

Maybe we’re so ready to blame others because there is no simple answer to that. Because we are all so entirely helpless to stop this leak, to stop this trainwreck that’s playing out on television and on the internet. We can’t plug that leak (though there’s a facebook group advocating shoving the higher ups in BP in there to seal it, again, satisfying, but probably not effective), we can’t all give up our lives to help clean those poor birds or create work for the fishermen.

But we can continue to put pressure on BP and the government to deal with this now. We can be more aware when politicians and companies talk about offshore or onshore drilling. We can consider our dependence on oil and encourage alternate source creations. We can pray for our friends, our families, for our Gulf, for our planet.

We can donate, we can write, we can speak out. We can make it so that no one ever forgets what happened. We can be the generation that prevents another disaster like this one. We can be the generation that sparks alternate fuel projects.

We must turn this outrage into something bigger, we need to turn this disaster around. And since we cannot plug that hole ourselves, since we can’t scream and yell at the head of BP or our politician of choice, we have to fix what we can.

And we can fix our future. We have to, because it cannot wait.

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