Alabamians are distraught by the slow floating black destruction of the state’s Gulf coast treasure that began this weekend.

In sadness, we Alabamians have thoughts about who and what are responsible for this, who and what will help the state recover from the tragedy, and who and what will help keep things like this from happening again.

We know we have an overpowering need for oil.

Few are kindly disposed to fabulously wealthy and greedy BP that gets us the oil.

We have anger for rich and greedy BP executives who may have thought more about themselves than about taking adequate safety precautions.

We think BP’s stockholders should not receive dividends before the clean up is finished. Some think about President Obama and the federal regulators and whether they may have fallen down in doing their jobs.

A few of us have in mind the plaintiffs’ lawyers who are hovering and readying to swoop in to siphon off for themselves hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of disaster recovery funds.

This is an election year. It would be nice if we could look to our political leaders to provide us leadership that we feel is trustworthy and reliable.

Millions of voters are making noises this year that they think Congress and other lawmakers have failed to do an acceptable job for the citizens.

Alabamians will be thinking a lot more during this horrible summer.

We (and all Americans) should be demanding of answers and leadership from politicians who purport to be leaders and kick them out of office in November if we think they have failed us.