Gas Pains

Published in the Desert Valley Times
April 12, 2005

As humans, we are constantly on the lookout for scapegoats.
Oh, we don’t use that term, but it’s conceptually accurate.
You can see it in the proliferation of frivolous lawsuits.
“I’m too stupid to know how to hold and drink a cup of coffee, so I’m just going to sue somebody for my burned crotch.”
When we run out of human beings to blame, we’ll often turn to the man upstairs, as if it’s somehow His fault that we’re overdrawn at the bank.
Now, we as a nation are being caught up in a crisis that we weren’t expecting, which was already pretty stupid on our part, but now that it’s here, we want to blame EVERYBODY else.
I’m talking about the price of a gallon of gas.
Word is that the near future will include gasoline prices of over three dollars a gallon.
Locally, some folks have started using the Maverik convenience store as the community punching bag.
Here’s a news flash for you:
It ain’t their fault.
In fact, you can discard your hate mail for all of the local fuel purveyors.
According to the Associated Press, Nevada has the third-highest prices for gas in America, averaging $2.38 a gallon, just behind California and Hawaii.
But we can’t hang the governor in effigy.
Keep moving up the blame trail.
The oil companies make an easy target, mostly because of their ten-dollar-a-gallon Stetson hats.
But it’s not their fault either, because it’s costing them nearly $60 a barrel to buy the stuff from our turbaned friends in Saudi Irobiya, Jordamfools, and Kuwaitandseewhatwechargenextmonth.
But we still can’t blame them.
Even if it was their fault, our government couldn’t do much about it, since we’re currently on hiatus from our favorite national game show, “Thumping Middle Eastern Countries for Fun and Profit” while the producers are working on the sequel, “Dropping Bombs On Countries Run By Guys Named Kim.”
If you want to go eyeball to eyeball with the person responsible for this whole mess, I have an exercise for you.
First, take out your car keys, head to your car, open the door, and get in.
Start the car and tune the radio to your favorite “All babble, All the time” radio station.
Then reach up and grab the rear-view mirror and twist it to face yourself as if you were going to apply lipstick.
(For many of our female readers, this will be an almost automatic function. For guys without recent Jaegermeister or college fraternity experience, it may take a few tries.)
Now, look deeply into the eyes staring back at you from that mirror.
You’ve found your culprit.
You know why gas prices are so high?
Because you’re willing to pay them.
End of story.
I remember taking a real estate class a few decades ago, back when I was still sane and believed that making money was a good thing.
The proctor, who was a realtor, passed out an info sheet on a house.
It included square footage, location, amenities, and price comparisons from three other properties.
Then he challenged the class to determine the market value of the house.
My hand shot up, ready to dazzle him with my intellectual superiority, buttressed by my intimate familiarity with advanced calculations involving square footage, replacement cost ratios, and formulas previously used to determine payloads for Apollo moonshots.
In other words, I knew my math.
Unfortunately, he knew real life.
“Wrong!” he exclaimed gleefully (or maybe it just seemed that way to the red-faced smartmouth whose hand shot up just moments before).
“The market price of a house is…whatever someone is willing to pay for it.”
This universal economic principle is applicable to everything, including and especially gasoline.
As long as we continue to buy this stuff by the tanker truck at whatever price is tossed onto the sign, that price isn’t going anywhere but skyward.
Don’t look so shocked.
This is the fourth or fifth time gas prices have spiked like this since the great oil embargo of the mid-seventies.
And if history has taught us anything, it’s this:
We’ll pay ANY price just so we don’t have to sit by that smelly, scary guy who is the poster child for public transportation.
So until we as a combined and cohesive nation make the commitment to drive less, car pool, build and buy more economical vehicles, give hydrogen fuels a chance, break out our bicycles, and begin taking vacations to locales which share our own zip codes, just look in that rear-view mirror, open up your wallet, stick out your cash, and say “Owww.”