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Our view: Gas prices can't bring down a country
Friday, July 04, 2008
While the Founding Fathers had great vision, they could have never foreseen this: $4-a-gallon gas.
Those learned 18th-century planters, lawyers and merchants had other pressing issues. You know, delivering the colonies from the oppression of King George III. On their long list of utmost grievances were not being able to govern themselves; being taxed without representative consent; being forced to house British troops; finding little justice in the courts; and having their towns burned and their lives destroyed.
There were obstacles galore to righting these wrongs and attaining liberty. Now, here we are today, presumably after we've learned a thing or two, and fully two-thirds of our citizens believe high gas prices to be the most important abuse facing the country.
Certainly, families and businesses are suffering, some of them terribly so. If you're barely keeping the kids fed and in shoes, or if you're struggling to meet payroll, paying these gas prices can force awful choices.
Serious as the problem is, the concern probably still would prompt stern lectures from those who mutually pledged to each other their lives, fortunes and sacred honor 232 years ago.
The cost of gasoline (and natural gas and heating oil, which we'll be talking more about come November) is really a symptom of a host of other bigger issues: A failure to have a national energy policy that's not so excessively dependent on foreign oil, and, at bottom, this society's insatiable demand for bigger and more things.
While we've been consuming and refusing to plan and invest, oil wells have been being drained and our competitors have been gaining on us, and, yes, besting us in research, development and innovation. As a result, wages have been brought down, jobs have evaporated.
America's challenges can seem titanic to the normal person, acting alone, just trying to get by. But, in fact, you don't have to look back too far in history, or too far past the gas pump, to see challenges where the answers, relatively speaking, aren't or weren't so easy.
There are, after all, alternative fuels and electric cars — if we could just perfect them and get them into production. Better and more expansive mass transit is not an impossibility. With the right political will and investments, these things are achievable — more easily accomplished, say, than declaring independence or ensuring that some crazed terrorist doesn't get hold of a dirty bomb.
Only 17 percent of Americans, according to the most recent AP-Ipsos poll, believe we're headed in the proper direction. There's no way to see that as a good thing — unless you extrapolate and also that people also are willing to change course and to help row.
Time and again we're given modern-day proof that there's no definitive guarantee of liberty simply because a piece of parchment inside the National Archives says it shall be so. With the privilege of freedom comes the responsibility not to be so myopic and unimaginative that we mistake fixable problems for impossible catastrophes.
The pain of high gas prices will end when we, as a country, commit ourselves to changing habits that are not immutable and exploiting the ingenuity that no one doubts exists, but has not been tapped, rewarded and brought to market.
