NEWS

Terry Dickson: Time to squeal a little more, little louder

Terry Dickson

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, GA. | We don’t squeal enough. Who knew I’d borrow a line from Jesse Jackson, but there it is.

When Jackson visited Waycross and Brunswick in April 2001 he told a story from his youth when he grew up in Greenville, S.C., near a Ballentine meat packing plant. Jackson said that Ballentine would haul in truck loads of hogs, which he pronounced hawgs, and dump them straight off the truck into boiling water.

That was ridiculously false, but Jackson was trying to make a point. He said the hawgs didn’t go quietly, that they squealed in protest unlike African-Americans who weren’t complaining about voter suppression, unequal pay and gaps in education along racial lines.

“Our problem,” Jackson said, “is we forgot how to squeal.”

That’s why I think every inch of shoreline in the U.S. should be open to offshore oil exploration and drilling. Florida squealed and got its Atlantic Coast put off limits.

It’s sort of like taxes. Everyone ought to have to pay, to have some skin in the game. Even if it’s $20,000 in annual income taxes or $20, you ought to squeal when you see any of it being wasted in Washington. That may be asking too much because you wouldn’t have time to do anything else but squeal.

As the crow flies, Georgia has 100 miles of coastline between Savannah and St. Marys that would be open for drilling. Except that’s not accurate. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says Georgia has 2,344 miles of shoreline as it defines it.

“Shoreline mileage of the outer coast includes offshore islands, sounds, bays, rivers and creeks to the head of tidewater to a point where tidal waters narrow to a width of 100 feet,” NOAA said in its report.

That means the shoreline in Georgia includes that muddy stretch of beach on St. Simons where the sliced golf balls land off the 10th tee on Sea Island’s Plantation course. It includes the rocks in Gould’s Inlet where I once caught a black drum after the reel flew off my rod as I was casting. It includes Hurd’s Island and Buttermilk Sound in McIntosh County, Little Cumberland Island and the St. Marys waterfront.

Along Florida’s 8,436 miles, it’s American Beach, Fernandina Beach and Cape Canaveral and in my home state, South Carolina, it’s the sea wall fronting The Battery and Rainbow Row in Charleston, Murrell’s Inlet, the boneyard beach on Edisto Island and Sullivan’s Island where those pesky Citadel cadets fired on Fort Sumter to start the Civil War.

In Maine, it’s Bar Harbor (pronounced Bah Hahbuh) and Lubec, the easternmost point of the U.S. coast where you can hear the whales blow on foggy summer days. It’s also York Beach, but I think that belongs to Canada as does Myrtle Beach certain times of year.

I’m a long way from Louisiana. I’ve got no skin in their game, but I can see what oil production has done to the wetlands there even when everything goes right when there are no Deepwater Horizons. Oil, gas and pipeline companies have dredged and cut through marshes for access to their offshore rigs. Scientists say it allows too much saltwater into the ecosystem and it’s destroying the marshes.

Many people of Louisiana aren’t squealing about that but they don’t seem to mind oilslicks. Consider for example Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

If you’re against offshore exploration in Georgia and Florida, perhaps your family of three shouldn’t go to the beach in a Suburban. Maybe you should walk to the mailbox

If we care about our the beaches of our states, we ought to care about North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Chesapeake Bay, Monterrey, Calif., Guam and America Samoa.

If you’re against it here, you ought to squeal about it everywhere. And if you can’t squeal, try howling.

terry.dickson@jacksonville.com, (912) 264-0405