The Tar Baby (the oil industry) says nothing and Brer Bear (BP) and Brer Fox (Halliburton) they lay low.
Brer Rabbits (us) have been yelling at the tar baby for 50 years trying to get it to speak but it has said nothing. We pound with our fists. Many of us are caught and become part of the tar baby. It gets bigger. We do not seem to notice.
The Tar baby holds us down and Brer Fox's and Brer Bear's brothers and sisters pick us off. None of us notice because we breed like rabbits. But the briar patch is gone now. So we look up at the shadow of the Tar Baby which is covered by a mountain of dead and dying rabbits. We look down at our hands and feet. They are stuck. We are stuck.
We say it is the Tar Baby's fault. We screamed and tried to get it to change, to talk to have some reaction, but who can change something that was never alive. Was it not our fault too because we knew that we were better than Tar Baby?
So let us start talking and tending to the living and each other. The green will spread and the tar baby inside all of us will melt away.
It's time to let the Tar Baby go.
Many thanks to those whose names I will never know, the Algonkin Native Americans, The Cherokee Native Americans, The Akan People, Joel Chandler Harris and Alcée Fortier.
Chris Landau
May 5, 2010
