“Part symposium, part potluck, all pre-mid-life crisis.”CLICK PHOTO FOR FULL ESSAY

Stinson Carter NPR Interview
Air Date: 6/22/10
click to hear my NPR interview on Gulf oil spill

Blood In The Water: We Shouted Out, “Who Killed The Pelicans?” When After All, It Was You and Me.
-By Stinson Carter

The Gulf has always been good to me. I come from a Gulf State, and grew up eating its oysters and shrimp, its Blue Crab and Red Snapper. I fished in it, swam in it, and nearly learned how to surf in it. But I also lived in a house built by oil. Oil paid the bills at my school and filled the coffers at my church. We’re Oil People who love our wildlife, and now we face the grim hazards of that contradiction.

When my mother was eight months pregnant with me, she and my father were swimming at a beach off Destin, Florida, when my mother was taken down by a wave and her plump belly struck the bottom. Hard. They were scared for their unborn son, and even blamed that wave for my premature birth a few weeks later. But I came out fine, and if that wave did me any harm, it was more than made up for by its value as an excuse for bad behavior: “Please forgive me, residual wave damage.” Every year as I grew up, my parents took me back to that same beach to stay in a little rented Florida Panhandle shack we called the Sunshine House. I always used to sprint down to the water the moment we’d end the seven-hour drive to build castles out of sand as soft and white as freshly sifted flour. And at the end of my childhood, when my parents divorced, it was to that same beach that my mother took me one particular weekend when things at home got too hard for her. As the Southern Belle daughter of a Gulf State, there was no landscape more affirming than a white sand ribbon wrapped around endless blue. This was the Gulf that I loved as a child of the Pelican State, and now our Pelican is covered in heavy oil and dying in tar-soaked sand.

But as much as I am the son of a Gulf State, I am also the son of an Oil State. Over water drilling was pioneered a few miles from my hometown, on Caddo Lake, where my grandmother owns stock in a hunting and fishing camp (not to mention, stock in Big Oil). When I was growing up, every house in my neighborhood was built by oil money. In my elementary school if your father wasn’t an Oil Man he was a lawyer who drafted their deals, a banker who handled their money or a doctor who delivered their babies. My father was in advertising, but whenever anyone asked him if he was in the oil business, he’d just say, “We’re all in the oil business.”

Our men love their “Sportsman’s Paradise,” but they also clamor for smaller government with no end in sight; no de-regulation is quite de-regulated enough for their taste. I get emails on a monthly basis from my uncles and cousins in the Louisiana Oil and Gas business about how our president will end the energy sector as we know it, through his government’s meddling. But perhaps what’s really washing up now on the coast is the proof that we can’t have it both ways. Environmental responsibility and industrial safety have never been the path of least resistance for the free market. And this is what happens when we contradict ourselves–wanting Laissez-Faire policies with the oil companies and peel-and-eat shrimp and fresh oysters and pristine places to take our families in the summer time. We have to pick a side: the economy’s or the planet’s, because we clearly haven’t yet figured out how to successfully reconcile the two.

We may be able to cap this hole in the bottom of the Gulf in a matter of weeks. And in a matter of years, we may get our beautiful shoreline back. But how many generations will it take until we shore up our contradictions?

A hole in the ground spewing thousands of barrels of oil a day can be the stuff of dreams or the stuff of nightmares. But the ground doesn’t decide which one it will be; we do.

By Stinson Carter
Source:HuffingtonPost.com

Go to any bar in any major city on a busy night, look around, and you’ll see more hands on PDA’s and cell phones than you’ll see on cocktails.

It used to be that if you tried to talk to someone, you only had to compete with the other people in the bar for their attention. Now, you also have to compete with whoever that person is texting–and usually it’s a few people.

We are having distracted bits and pieces of conversation via text to people who aren’t with us, which of course makes us have distracted bits and pieces of conversation with the people who are. We all go about our lives now with one foot in the invisible realm of our e-social lives. Admit it, if you’re out with a friend and they get up to go to the bathroom, the first thing you do is reach instinctively for your PDA/phone, when you used to just sit idly and people-watch. Because even when it’s quiet, it never stops whispering at you from your pocket or your purse: “cheeeeck meeeee. I could be that person who blew you off, finally coming to my senses. I could be that work email you’ve been waiting for. I could be that invitation to something better than where you are now.” It whispers, it calls to us, it is both our social wellspring and the black hole devouring The Now.

I am just as guilty of this as anyone; the vague “yeah’s and uh-huhs” I give people sitting next to me as I try to finish off a text, the endless checking and re-checking for responses, all of it. So the challenge I level now is for myself as much as it is for everyone else: try existing for a night without your phone and see what happens. See how much more you focus on the taste of the wine, or the food, and the person you’re sharing it with. See how much more likely you are to notice the smiling glance across the room, or listen to the story the old regular is telling his glass of whiskey. That phone or that PDA is all past and future tense, and no present. And if the present is the only thing that really exists and our texting habits are allowing us to disregard it, then doesn’t that mean that we are ceasing to exist?

Living on Eggshells: Lessons From The Depression
By Stinson Carter, 3/24/2009
Source: HuffingtonPost.com

My grandmother made the best lemon meringue pie you ever had. And when she cracked her eggs, she’d always dip her finger in the shells to get out every last drop of white. She was a child of The Depression, her mother died giving birth to her ninth child and my grandmother — the eldest of the nine — had to take her mother’s place at sixteen. Whatever food my great-grandfather could buy on his country mailman’s wages had to be stretched to feed a house full of hungry, squalling mouths.

We’re all picking up our own versions of the eggshell ritual these days. Maybe you circle past the valet until you find a spot on the street, maybe you just don’t go out to eat much anymore, or maybe you go to a matinee instead of Macy’s on Sunday afternoons. Even if you’re doing fine, you’ve probably started making your coffee at home, and you’ve finally found the courage to say, “tap” when the waiter asks, “sparkling or flat?”

True, we will always be the creators of the Hail Mary pass, and this is still the Republic of Risk and Reward. But when did we begin to cripple ourselves with the idea that “rich” is a stage of life as inevitable as adolescence or old age, and with the attitude that no amount of debt or deception can keep us from getting our due? When were we consumed by our own consumption? We’ve always heard that rich and happy aren’t the same thing, but its been a while since we’ve been forced to prove it.

The last lemon meringue pie my grandmother made was in the cramped kitchen of her assisted living apartment. When she got into that scraping out the eggshells business, I gave her a typically impatient 20-year-old’s glance and offered her an extra egg. “No, this is the best part!” she said. But she also said the best part of a chicken is the bony back and the best part of being old was getting to work till she was 75.

I’m beginning to see that using every drop of egg white because every drop counts makes the best pie; eating the bony back so your kids can have the rest makes that the best piece; and being proud of your job makes working till 75 better than a cushy retirement. I may not ever be so frugal with eggs, and I wouldn’t dare eat a chicken back, but I do hope she’s right about that last thing.

We’re all in this together, and the choices we’ll have to make won’t end at tap water and street parking. But in every new choice is a chance to make sure that it won’t be the scope of our problems that our grandchildren remember us by, but the wisdom of our solutions.

By Stinson Carter
Source: HuffingtonPost.com

Facebook: where we spy on our ex, stay in touch with that fling in Europe, judge our friends’ inane hourly updates, and get hounded by our high school classmates. But where we keep up with mom, it most certainly is not–or at least not until now.

A friend of mine complained to me the other night that his mother posted a “Happy V-Day, Love Mom” comment, and he called her to apologize after deleting it. A girl who overheard him retelling the story piped in immediately, “I can’t believe you! If I saw that on your page I’d think it was adorable.” When she was finished with him, it was clear my friend would never delete his mother’s posts again.

Remember how you always told your Mom she couldn’t stop youth culture? Well it’s payback time, and you can’t stop mom culture, either. Today, with an audience of millions of moms across America, Oprah joined “the Facebook revolution.” You thought your Mom was getting a little too close for comfort on the Internet before? Just you wait. You’ve gotten that Sunday phone call ever since you left home, but get ready for the Sunday comment and photo tag.

Maybe you’re afraid she’ll snoop around your page. Are you still talking to that old flame she always said was “just not good enough for you?” Are you getting tagged in pictures of you wearing that “naughty nurse” Halloween costume or that Michael Phelps-esque portrait of you and your bong? Probably. But rather than worrying too much about that, maybe you should just be thankful that mom’s interested in being part of your life.

I was a little freaked the day I clicked the “new friend requests” tab and saw my Mom smiling at me. I took a second to adjust, and then clicked “Approve.” Aunts and uncles started showing up in there the next day, and I think it’s wonderful. For the most part, they’re far less innocent than we think they are. So what if they don’t want their relationships with us to move into grandparent mode when we move out of the house? They’ve heard about “this Facebook” where everyone around the world is connecting. They want to be part of it, and you’re who they want to connect with. So if the question is, “How do you ignore your mom’s friend request?” The answer is, “How could you?”