Johnathon Owen
Dr. Hill Taylor
ENG 101
February 1st,
2012
Real Texts
Reading Response #2, Pg. 56
In President Obama’s Remarks after a
briefing on the BP Oil spill, the President was able to effectively establish
an apologetic relationship with his audience by reassuring them that all possible
efforts were being made by the government and BP Oil to contain the well leak
and clean up the Gulf. His response also projected the blame away from the
government through use of sobering examples and facts. However, if the
circumstance would have been slightly different, President Obama could have delivered
a drastically different speech. In this hypothetical speech, imagine that Obama
was making a public apology to the Gulf community for slow action taken by the
government to control the oil spill. This apology would affect different
audience members in completely different ways.
The most affected audience members would
be the residents of the coastal gulf region. The President would be most likely
making this apology directly to these citizens. Regardless of how sincere this
apology would be, it would still not be enough to ease the pain that these
citizens had endured before the apology. With that being said, one can now
analyze the effects of the new apology on the audience who was not in immediate
location of the oil spill.
Democratic politicians who were seeking
reelection would have experienced adverse effects from the delayed apology. The
delayed response from both the federal and state governments, followed by a
delayed apology would have had a strong effect on the voting population.
Already angered by their devastating situation, the delayed action would have
led to more environmental
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injury, and possibly
human death. Most likely, the democratic officials who were in office at that
time would not be reelected. This apology would simply be too little, too late.
On the contrary, the President’s late
response to the crisis would have had a positive effect on BP Oil executives.
Following the spill, several of these officials were fired, or were pressured
to resigned. Had Obama delivered this speech later than he did, BP could have
taken advantage of the government while it was in an apologetic state, giving
these executives more time to fix the issue, and potentially keep their jobs.
Also, BP could have avoided such a large public relations effort had Obama
delivered the hypothetical speech. Granted, BP would still be responsible for oil
clean up and paying damages to Gulf residents, but they could have been able to
project the blame off themselves and on the government just enough to avoid
being boycotted and hated by the nation.
The late action by the government would
possess negative consequences for the engineers who were tasked with cleaning
up the spill. The government’s late reaction to the crisis would in turn lead to
extremely delayed action by the engineers. The time the government wasted on
making the Gulf tragedy a political issue may have been enough time to push the
environment past its breaking point. If this would have happened, it could have
been almost impossible for the engineers to solve the problem. The engineers
who would have been tasked after the delayed apology would hold no
responsibility if the environment failed because of being neglected for so
long.
In all actuality, President Obama did a fairly
good job at addressing the public when he did. Sooner would have been better,
but any later would have held adverse repercussions for most
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audience members.
Regardless of when the apology was issued, the Gulf environment and its
inhabitants still had to deal with one of the largest crisis’s their area had
ever seen. The ones at fault have paid the price, and hopefully the gulf area
will be able to fully recover.
