I will start the day by saying" CRAP". Not just any crap, the dark, oily , expensive kind that comes from way down in the earth. Well, "crap" just doesnt begin to describe our feelings, now does it? The particlular brand of crap that they shovel, or should I say pump, at us is the source of much heartache. We have to buy their crap if we want to go to work or school and we have no way to dictate to them what will happen if they dont stop throwing crap at us that costs more per pound than milk. Oh, right. I forgot. Since they charge more for their crap, milk costs more, now. And bread. And soup. And clothes. And heat. and.......
For most of my life gas rose a bit here and there and I suppose, by leaps and bounds in the 70's. It went from 35cents a gallon to about a dollar and then settled around 85 to 90 cents for a while. Quite a while if you use the current happenings as a measuring stick. even through the nineties it only fluctuated at most 30 cents. Now thats a weekly thing. I know, for about 6 or 8 months its settled around 2.50 to 2.75, but look at the last 3 years. Up 30 cents by the end of this week and maybe more by the end of the month. Yo-yo from hell. I have felt the pain of the poor slobs that have to contend with gas taking up possibly a fourth or a third of their income just to get to work and do their daily tasks. Then they get to pay bills and buy food and buy things for their family like shoes, clothes, entertainment, etc.
That brings me to what jammed us into the current problem: credit cards. How many have had to swipe that damnable piece of plastic to get their food for the week and in the back of their head, wonder"How am I going to pay the payment on this?" Lives have been ruined, homes lost, marriages ended and worse over this financial mess. I know, some of you cant live if you dont have a card to make ends meet, but what is the alternative? Can you do without something for a while and still get your gas, groceries and getups? Hey, I kinda like that....the three g's...I'm going to use that from time to time. Any-whoo....I've seen folks that, once they start using a card, they feel they cant stop. "I'll make the minimum payments, pay off a bunch when I get income tax." Then it becomes a viscious cycle. Spend, borrow,spend, borrow...sounds like the government.(you see where it got them). Sacrifice, people. Figure out how. Do without, throw them out. You can break the cycle and besides, do you really want to owe some titanic company exhorbitant amounts of interest which they WILL tack on when you only make the minimums or miss a payment?
If you follow the news, the current blame game goes to the speculators on the stock market. Remember when we used to blame the Arabs? It's not very p.c. right now , so the media had to blame someone. The hell of it is, it's true. It's just like pork belly futures. A bunch of jackasses sit around reading reports, determining whether the pig crops will be good or bad, then they set the price for pork bellies and ....down the line....you pay more or less for bacon. Same with gas. I heard an analyst( or should I call them anal-ists) on the radio last night saying that the price of oil is a "good indicator of projected economic growth". What's that mean? It means that at the first chance they get, they figure out how to extort more money from us. Our dollar buying more? RRRiiiiPPPPP!!!....goes the dollars from our pockets. Job growth looking good? rrrippp. Home sales up? rrrriiiippp. and on and on...
So here we have some weasely little graduate from Brown or Yale or Penn State, speculating his ass off so that they can raise fuel and heating oil prices at the first indication of us having a few dollars extra on a payday. I say we just stop. One day is about all it should take. Fire, ambulance and police, everyone else, stay home, dont drive your car, your 4 wheeler, your boat. dont turn on your lights, tv, radio, toaster, anything. Converse among yourselves and then yell at me. Cant be done, oh no! Bull. The problem is, most people wont sacrifice anything to make the difference. We should go as far as shutting down all tv and radio. Save every drop of electric and gas that we possibly can. NO FRIGGING CELL PHONES!!!!!! Emergency only. Walk around your neighborhood or your property or wherever you're at. I know, we are a mobile society. We arent used to the old ways anymore. One lousy day is all it would take. One day would allow for a massive glut of oil that speculators, investors, execs, arabs, south americans and dictators would have to eat. No cash for Dubai to build another indoor ski park so their 120 degree heat wont melt it too fast. (true story). No cash for them to light their cigars with and buy that new 36 room mansion by the coast, with. OH MY GOD!!, You would think I just asked you to sacrifice your child on the altar of Walmart!!! It boils down to that ugly word I just mentioned: Sacrifice. Maybe if I could gain enough support, I could take this national. I just fear that the biased media would never touch it.
Yes, gas doesnt just come from the middle east. It comes from south america and here as well. There are many countries starting to drill along coasts that were long off limits. Ours are still taboo as well as many pristine areas of our federal lands. If done correctly, the environmental impacts could be quite minimum. I am sick to the gut of importing oil and exporting some of what we have.
Now we come to alternatives. Electric would be ideal, its cheap, clean and efficient. It would be, except Americans wont sacrifice power, styling and familiarity to start us on the path of freedom. We are slaves to places like the middle east and China. (pick up just about anything in your house and tell me it didnt come from china or taiwan or malaysia). I'm sure they could make more efficient vehicles, but they dont. It's not economically sound for them. If most average Americans would go to electric or some alternative and our shipping infrastructure would be given more efficient diesel movers, you would see a drastic difference in our overall way of life. We need to go back to more rail shipments to supply our ravenous appetite for all things walmart. For the last 10 years or so, we've done nothing but rip up tracks that have existed since the 1800's and make so called "rail-trails" out of them.
Bio-diesel and ethanol would be awesome, because there's not as much trade off with power in your vehicle. You do lose some power, but if you could get your fuel for 75 cents instead of 2dollars and 75 cents, dont you think you and the country would be better off? Dont let them fool you with the "crops to fuel" crap they want to feed you. We have a surplus of immense proportions every year of corn and other staples. The bio-fuels can be made from switch grass, cattails, yes, i said cattails, and just about anything that will ferment. Take about half of the trillion dollar "bailout" money and build some damned bio-fuel factories. Oh, right. Big Oil wont allow that, now will they? They pay the elected officials in one form or another with "donations" and "grants" and we pay them. I have personally ripped off an arm a leg and a testicle when gas went to $4 a gallon, to get to work and pay for heat. They bought statues for Bernie Madoff's Christmas presents.
Bio-fuels are cheap, plentiful(since it can be made from just about anything that grows) and would make sense, since most of our vehicles either run on them or could be converted easily. Wow, imagine that, Americans doing something that made sense. Screw Big Oil. Why should they get all my money? Hell, if they want to build the plants, sell me the bio-fuel, fine. They just dont want to because the profit margin wont be as high. The production costs are low, too. Crude oil is expensive to refine and did you know that gas is more or less a waste product of the process? Heating oil and diesel come out of the mix closer to the top and gas is the last thing left. The wast product of an outmoded system. Did you know that some of the first vehicle invented were actually electric and ethanol users? Its true. Look it up. Some guy in Pennsylvania changed that for us. Oh, and a Rockefeller or two.
So where does that leave us? Seriously, the only thing I can think is that when gas goes up to 6 or 8 dollars a gallon(think its far-fetched? think again) maybe then I can get you and about 250 million other people to join me in a "Great American Fuel-Out". So, in the meantime, you might think about some of the things I've given you today and remember when you shell out $4o to fill up your truck that in another 6 months or a couple years that could easily turn into $100 or more. I'm crazy, you say? We shall see. I hope I'm wrong, but one more bad downturn in the economy and we may see 4 or 5 or 6 dollar a gallon gas again. I hope that maybe then, Joe America will give my little experiment a try and then maybe we can fling crap at the oil companies. Kinda like monkeys in a zoo...except I wont be using alternative means of cleaning said fingers....
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