Today, I paid roughly the same price for a grande Americano from Starbucks as I did for a gallon of gasoline.
The espresso drink tasted good, briefly put a small smile on my face and put an extra spring in my step for a few hours. The gallon of gasoline enabled me to travel approximately 20 miles (I drive a small SUV, and it was part highway traffic, part city traffic) to my job, where I recouped the travel cost in approximately 5 to 10 minutes of work.
When I purchased the beverage from Starbucks I did so quite willingly and without any duress whatsoever. When I pumped the gasoline into my vehicle, I huffed, puffed, sighed, and rolled my eyes.
Fairly warped perspective isn't it?
My only condolence is that I am not alone. While gas prices creep up and up, so does the health of the economy as Americans spend and spend. Certainly there is a limit to how much the economy can bear to transport goods and services from point A to point B, but from the looks of things, we haven't reached that point yet.
But while I try and put the rising cost of gasoline in perspective, on the contrary, I don't want people to calm down about the matter. Please, by all means, get amped up about it. The more attention my fellow citizens and the politicians that represent us pay the matter, the sooner we will move towards reducing our nation's dependence on foreign oil.
People are acting as if the current oil prices are a crisis. Clearly, if we can afford Starbucks drinks and high definition televisions and cell phones that take pictures and sneakers for our children that light up for heaven's sake, then we are no where near the status of "crisis".
But we are playing with borrowed time. At some point, soon or later, next month, next year, or next decade, we are going to have a real crisis. The nation is one violent incident in the Middle East or change in policy based on the whim of a former desert nomad away from serious problems that would bring our economy and lives to a screeching halt.
Some call for increasing our supply of oil through domestic means. Go for it I say. Some advocate a "let's send a man to the moon in ten years" style scientific effort to develop alternative energy sources. Again I say, go for it. I would even suggest tax credits to oil companies to build refineries, tax incentives to automobile manufacturers to increase fuel efficiency.
When President Bush stated that the nation was addicted to oil, he was right. And what happens when an addict's addiction is removed cold turkey? I for one would rather see America weaned off of foreign oil than abruptly sent to detox.
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