7000 Kids With Cans

I stopped in at my friend Lew's house the other day and found him sitting on the sofa watching President Obama's press conference. Like most Americans, Lew thought that the President's statements were disappointing. Lew and I agreed that people don't want to hear the government say that they have been working very hard to do the best they can to get everything done as quickly as possible. They want something more.
I asked Lew how his bunny, Mozart, was doing. Lew said he was sad. 'He's upset about the oil spill. He feels sorry for his bunny brothers in the Gulf.'
In more seriousness, Lew made an interesting point. He said that the President needs to be like Winston Churchill in the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940. Hundreds of thousands of British troops were stranded on a French beach, and Winston Churchill called for every man with a boat to try to make it to the Dunkirk shores and rescue some soldiers. The result was amazing. Thousands of little fishing boats made dangerous trips across the English Channel, rescuing over 300,000 soldiers and boosting the morale of the nation. Lew suggested that the government pay anyone with a boat to go out into the gulf and clean up the oil. He said that he wants to see footage on television of thousands of children in boats scooping up coffee-cans full of oil. Like Churchill's call for rescue of the Dunkirk soldiers, this would be the wrong thing to do, but it would get people passionate about the oil spill.