On the 4th of July, I felt such great joy to live in a county founded upon the principles of freedom, individual rights, and personal responsibility. As the fireworks-induced euphoria passed, my mood turned darker. As many freedoms as we have, which are guaranteed by our Constitution and fought for by patriots at home and abroad, we live enslaved to our addiction to oil.
Far too many of our most vital economic and foreign policy decisions must factor in our dependency upon oil to keep our economy running. We kowtow and beg indulgences from countries that do not share our vision of freedom and democracy just because they have the oil we crave. This is not merely demeaning, but is a very real threat to our economic survival.
I, too, was shocked when gasoline rocketed to near $4 per gallon. I couldn’t believe it took more than $50 to fill up my Pontiac Sunfire. It’s a compact car! Now that I’ve moved into acceptance about the situation, I am beginning to see what a blessing $140+ per barrel oil could be for our country and eventually the world.
I don’t want to sound either flip or unfeeling about the very real pain that people are experiencing. Many in the United States who were barely making ends meet, now find their budgets shattered by an inflationary spiral driven by rising cost of oil which means gasoline, utilities, all plastic products and packaging, groceries, and everything that must be delivered by truck.
Our citizens are suffering, and their pain will become even more acute in the months and years ahead. An untold number of people in other countries will die of starvation because food is too expensive to even make it to their shores. And, yet, I still believe that high oil prices are the best thing that could happen in a very, very bad situation.
Many anthropologists have posited that the human is in the adolescent phase of its development as a species. We have certainly acted like spoiled teenagers, burning the midnight oil every day like it will last forever. It won’t, and we now have the sticker shock to prove it.
Do not expect oil prices to come down anytime soon. Yes, some of the price is due to speculators, but they are only anticipating China and India’s economies ramping up their voracious appetites for gasoline. In China, they are going through a highway building boom which will dwarf anything that President Eisenhower did when he built our Interstates. And, all those highways will have cars which will use gas which will… well, you know the end of that story.
So, let us do the adult thing. We bite the bullet today and invest in hydrogen fuel cells, solar and wind technologies, clean coal, safe nuclear power and seed other undreamed of innovations that will never be thought of as long as oil is cheap.
Let us make our Declaration of Independence from foreign oil and throw American ingenuity, treasure, and “Can Do’ spirit into alternative energy research. We did it with the Manhattan Project. We did it when we went to the moon. We must do it now. As Benjamin Franklin said, “We must hang together, gentlemen, or we will most assuredly hang separately.”
Dennis Tardan is a communications coach, empowerment trainer, and professional speaker who lives in Victoria, Texas. His company is Tardan Professional Development www.tardanprodev.com. Write to Dennis at .
