On the recordJune 30, 2010
You know, the thing that strikes me is most people that I know--I am an engineer. Engineers are kind of geeks anyway, but we have such a predictable sort of thought pattern, and that is, now we've got this great big hole that we've just drilled in the bottom of the ocean. Now, you can talk about that it's a mile deep and there's tremendous pressure. We are going to talk about this because you used to have an oil rig, and we need to talk about oil. But in it's simplest form, there's this ocean, and there's a hole in the bottom, and it's leaking oil. And my impression is that most Americans I know, when you have all this sloppy, yucky, sticky oil pouring out of a hole in the ocean floor, your first reaction is to try to figure out, how do you fix it. You know, you want to try to say, Okay, let's get some people together that know about this stuff, and let's stop the problem, and let's try to mitigate the damage that's done, clean it up; but let's stop it from spilling oil. I mean, that's such a fundamental thing. Engineers have this big weakness. They're always ready to fix something when they haven't even defined what the problem is, but that's such a knee-jerk reaction. And yet what we've got here is somebody who is more ready to try to figure out who to blame than to fix the problem.
