I’m having trouble caring about the gigantic oil spill in the Gulf.

It’s not that I don’t think it’s horrible, or huge, or likely to have catastrophic effects. Quite the opposite. My problem is that it’s so horrible and huge and potentially catastrophic that I can’t wrap my head around it. It feels like science fiction.

I don’t know what that many hundreds of thousands (or is it millions? or more?) of gallons looks like, in water or oil or any other form. I don’t think I’ve even ever seen crude oil. I’ve never been to the Gulf Coast, so it’s easy for it to seem like a fictional place wracked by too-big-to-be-non-fiction storms and larger than life tobacco plantations and Mardi Gras parties. It’s a place I’ve only seen in movies, only read about in books and newspapers. It’s like the moon.

And so, just like missions to the moon, it seems like something that only Other People can deal with. But unlike missions to the moon, this problem has never been solved before, which makes it more like a mission to an as yet undiscovered galaxy. Any solution seems too ineffectual, too removed from my sense of reality, to make any real difference. And all this makes it too easy for me to just dismiss trying solutions at all, which isn’t a helpful attitude, for sure.

Unfortunately, my conscious brain seems to have very little control over the unconscious part of itself that says “this is too much to be true.” And so I listen to NPR every morning in a state of suspended disbelief, knowing that this thing is science fiction but caring about it in the same way that I cared about Gandalf or Aslan or Lauren Olmina.