Holy Oil

The Passover Sedar and the Maundy Thursday services are both deeply connected to the rhythms of the moon. In addition to the holy bread and wine, there is also the holy oil also from the earth. Something so sacramental as the oil of our blessings and healings is so closely related to the oil that has brought decades of occupied violence and controlled imaginations. You see, when the automobile was first made attainable by the general population with the Model T, it was made to run on either gasoline or ethanol. Except back then in the 1920's it wasn't really called ethanol, it was called moonshine. Moonshine was made by the people close to the land, the farmers and mountain people of distant lands and generation who knew how to take something that was rotting, destined for trash and transform it into a resource. With a flip of a switch Ford's automobile converted the carborator from running on gasoline or ethanol.

At this point in time the Rockerfeller's held a near monopoly on the gasoline industry. Certainly the Rockerfellers didn't appreciate it when the people could drive and then stop at a local farm filling up at the still. Standard Oil Company flipped the hyperbolic switch toward industrial corporate power during the time of the prohibition. John D. Rockerfeller funded prohibition. At which point in time the moonshine, which was made from anything containing a sugar or a starch, became illegal. Rather than our gasoline supporting local economies, we have been carried down a trajectory toward endless war. Most of the attempts that the United States Government has made in reverting back to the use of ethanol has been to make it using corn. Now the interesting part to using corn -based ethanol is that not only has it made corn practically unaffordable throughout the majority of cash crop growing Latin Americans, the monocultures of the petro-industrial agricultural system require one gallon of gasoline to grow a bushel of corn. It is more efficient to use the straight up gasoline in our engines then in the tractors to grow the corn, to generate the heat for the ethanol conversion. Most importantly in the context of human induced global environmental degradation, and the collapsing global economies, we fill our landfills with the materials that would have been our blessing.

In our neighborhood where there are 28 known contaminated USEPA sites and the waste for the region comes in both all the trash, stormwater, and recycling , we are sitting on the new goldmine. Two thousand years ago, Pliny the Elder wrote that the two greatest curses of civilization were the discovery of silver and gold. Perhaps oil and gas should be added to the list of natural wealth that ends up damaging more then helping people in many parts of the world that are rich in subsoil resources. I imagine the land in Pennsyvania and all our waterways between being filled with poinsins of the Hydrolic Fracking raping to remove natural gas out from the Marcellus Shale and filling wells with the concoction of drilling fluids. Here across the Delaware River in Philadelphia, the people are marching in protest against the dumping of the drilling fluids from Fracking in the sewage treatment plants that are far more than less equipped to purify the poinsons thusly pouring into our open waterways.