When another group of people in Nigeria were burnt to death
while waiting for
refined petroleum from an illegally
tapped pipeline in May 2006, it struck me that
what they
had done/what had happened to them
is central
to where
we are as a species right now.
We want
petroleum, and we know that it
may kill
us or our
friends, or school children walking by.
The news
story saddened me, but opened my
heart
and eyes by
blurring any lines of difference
between myself and the dead,
except
that I was born to a more privileged
relationship to oil
than they were, and I am alive
and relatively unharmed. The story of this firey
love affair between Homo
Sapiens and petroleum will
have many more chapters
as we think
about how
hard,
fast and deep
we
want to
burn into the night.
The blind is meant to
reattach those stories
to the petroleum that
makes a plastic pull-down
blind, making it
not
an object lesson in
the
evils of anything,
but a reflection
of our time.
