Tired of Paying High Gas Prices? Then Read This

Tired of paying high gas prices? Sick of foreign countries getting rich from the money we spend? Worried that this money may be spent on weapons aimed at America? Fed up with having to choose between buying food, or getting to work? Do you feel helpless, and that nobody is doing anything about this torture we are being put though?

You have just filled the gas tank of you vehicle. You look at the pump and see the total amount you have to pay. Things are expensive enough, now gas prices are shooting though the roof! You begin to get angry and wonder who is to blame. Who else? The government. That pack of greedy hounds must be the ones causing this misery. People actually get angry. I once witnessed a conversation while pumping my gas the other day. A man just finished filling his tank, and in passing said to the lady waiting behind him, "Man, it sure is getting expensive just to fill a tank." The lady replied, "Yeah, I wish someone would shoot that damn president." I was finishing my business and noticed that both were older than me. I also noticed that the man drove off in a large sedan as the lady pulled up in her big older truck.

Yes, the price of oil and gasoline has skyrocketed in the last few years. In 2000, I was paying a little over a buck a gallon. Just a mere eight years later, I am paying almost four times that amount. Has this current oil crisis been caused by an inept government, and our country's involvement with Middle Eastern countries? Yes our involvement with these countries over the last several decades plays a large role in this price gouging. As for our government, it is not ineptitude. It is more of a general confusion in policies. America has an overall tendency to display our politics in mixed messages to other nations.

Yes, I am angry. I am angry that our country's economy is held hostage by these tiny nations, their only bargaining power being the main by-product of our fuel supply. But I am also disappointed in the American people. Because it appears that we did not learn from our past mistakes, and sometimes this angers me. Those who are younger may not realize why we are in this mess, because no one wants to admit our past stupidity. Everyone avoids saying that we have been through this before. I hate to sound like a grandfather telling the kids about how bad the old days were, but here it is anyway.

In the late 1970's we were having problems with other nearby neighboring countries when the trouble began. Gasoline shot from about fifty cents a gallon to a dollar in a matter of months. Soon it developed into a full-fledged crisis, and the oil that was being withheld was causing fuel shortages. Fuel was so scarce that we began a nation-wide program called 'odd and even' days. The idea goes like this. People could only buy gas according to what number their license plate started or ended with. If it was an even day, and your license started with a three, you could not buy gas that day, at all. Not that buying gas was a picnic. At the height of the crisis we were sitting in lines up to a mile just to buy gas on the right day. Some people would wait in line for hours, only to find the pumps empty when it was finally their turn.

The same people (government) told us then to conserve on fuel, check the air in your tires, use cruise control, and drive slower. They told it to us day and night, on television, in newspapers, the radio, on billboards, in school, everywhere you went. Wind power, air power, sun power, waterpower, and even manure power, blah, blah, blah. Tiny little fuel-saving Japanese cars became the new trend. Everyone had to have one, and prices went up for the perceived lifesavers. In turn, Japan became a rich nation. Did we learn anything from all this wonderful and informative tax-paid education? No. As soon as the crisis was over, gas stabilized in the dollar range, staying that way until the last several years. The only ones who learned anything in all this were the Middle Eastern countries. Now instead of just cutting us off, they slow the supply down and raise the price. It sort of reminds you of a heroin dealer, does it not? On the other hand, we Americans did not learn a thing.

America had reached a point that always happens to a prosperous country, and it is not the first time either. It happened after WWI during the Jazz Age, after WWII during the Eisenhower years. America citizens let their defenses down, becoming fat dumb and complacent. The same thing happened in the nineties. Hey, it was the Clinton years. Fast and loose, anything you want is all right, die young and leave a good-looking corpse. Everything we had learned about recycling, conservation, and more importantly an oil supply that cannot be replenished, just flew out the window. Americans were tired of conserving. So let the good times begin!

We stuck our noses up at our parent's station wagons, in favor of heavier mini vans to go back and forth to the store. We became infatuated with military vehicles, and just had to have the big ugly monsters to proudly stand out above the crowd. As our computers became faster, we wanted everything else faster, including how fast we drive. Oil is going to last forever, right? There is more than enough oil under that sand to last us for hundreds of years, right? Screw conservation. We want to get to where we are going bigger, and however fast we want to go. Yeah it was fun while it lasted. Unfortunately I did not see any dinosaurs around, dying and decomposing while we were having so much fun.

Instead, Americans lost interest in alternative power because it was not fast enough. Who wants to travel thirty-five miles and hour, right? Never mind you cannot even walk ten miles in an hour, and most of us cannot even manage a continuous fifteen to twenty miles an hour on a bicycle. Now the same people who knew better thirty years ago, are living in huge houses and using more electricity than your local Wal-Mart. They fly around in fuel consuming jets, traveling in parades of large gas guzzling vehicles, telling us how much American citizens need to sacrifice and conserve. I call them Hippie-crites. Yet the nightmare of our current situation is not the government's fault, which most of us would prefer to blame. No, it is our fault.

Look at it from the perspective of the oil supplier. They look at Americans and see us slobbering over and sucking up every ounce of oil we can get our hands on. They watch us as we drive like there is no tomorrow, offering opportunity to further twist the dagger as we gorge ourselves on their product. Just like any business, it is a question of supply and demand, but it is common with everybody. I remember during the 1989 earthquake in California, when stores were charging five dollars for a fifty-cent gallon of water. Yeah, it is human nature to take advantage of a situation. Why not them? We keep sucking their oil up like pigs at feeding time nonetheless. Just like the two older folks at the gas pump, we just do not get it.

Now to give you an answer to the title of this article, are you tired of paying high gas prices? Do you want something to be done about it, right now, right this minute? It is very simple, really. America needs to lower the demand in supply. We must buy less gas. If we purchase less oil, prices will lower to retain the same measure of profit. In other words, they must lower the price so that customers will return to buy more oil again, in order to keep making the same amount of money. Look at it as any business economic major would. The supplier wants to retain the measure of profit they have achieved, especially since they have grown accustomed to the lifestyle is has brought them.

Only because there are profits to be made is our government now suddenly involved once again. The doomsday rhetoric and blaming sounds reassuring (or scary) to hear, but does not immediately solve very much on their part. Who wants to take their word for it or trust them anyway? If we did like we were supposed to do thirty years ago, this would never have occurred, but that is spilt milk. We are dealing with it now, and it is up to the American citizen (again) to do our part as well, in order to get us out of this mess. We can probably do it more competently than the politicians anyway. It boils down to an old hippie word, individualism. Only not in selfishness as it was said by hippies, but with a conscious individual effort to do our part in helping our country remain great.

How, you may ask? It is very easy, but requires a different way of thinking, and some thirty year-old lessons. It begins with an understanding that we cannot drive a vehicle without gas, much less run even fifteen miles an hour. We need to accept that a speed limit is not so bad when compared to those alternatives. I have spent over thirty years watching how people drive, and it has not been a pretty sight in terms of valued human traits such as consideration and unselfishness. These traits transmit to the foot, which in turn reflects our individual personalities and emotions. They spend thousands of dollars on research studies of this kind. The best thing about our driving habits is that it is often entertaining and free to watch every day. I could write a book on the sometimes-idiotic ways we drive.

You know what I am talking about, and maybe not even be aware that you are contributing to the madness, because it is not just the obvious manic idiot on the road wasting gas. From what I have seen, about eighty-percent of drivers are simply wasting precious fuel in various degrees. Maybe the rest of us did not retain the information after high school, but even educated people appear to be blindly ignorant in logic and common sense when it comes to driving and consuming gasoline. Let us first set aside the fact that our driving habits are often rude, inconsiderate and selfish. That is more of an issue with society. The important result in these habits is how this behavior affects our consumption of gasoline.

You do not believe me? I used to be a mechanic/machinist for ten years. The plain fact of the matter is that our 'vroom-vroom' pedals affect gas consumption. You do not have to be a scientist to figure this out. I do not care if your car is a fancy new hybrid or a four cylinder, you will use more fuel when asking your engine to perform at a higher rate. The rate of flow is further increased by quickly changing the rate at which it flows. In other words, the more you push your gas pedal up and down because you are in a hurry darting in and out of traffic, you are consuming even more fuel.

We must also realize that the speed limit is not an imposition to make our lives miserable. These speeds were researched and calculated by highly educated minds, deciding on which would be best to safely and efficiently move all traffic at reasonable speeds. These are just plain facts, and there is no way to get around them, no matter how alternative our fuel sources become. It does not matter if we are scared into believing our earth will crumble into dust. The truth of the matter is, it all boils down to individual consumption.

Like I said before the less gas we use, the lower prices will become. If you do not like the idea of making foreign countries rich enough to buy weapons of destruction, do your part as a proud American citizen. Show these countries we are tired of being raked over the coals. Give it to them where it hurts. Go to sleep earlier, so you do not feel rushed (stressed) when you finally get up at the last minute. Do not get up at the last minute, and plan ahead for traffic. Use your cruise control and be entertained watching all the other maniacs dart and dash about, to only get a few car lengths ahead, behind someone actually obeying the law. You will soon discover that you still get there on time, and in a much less stressed-out mood. Trust me.

Keep a safe distance so that you can ease your gas pedal when traffic slows down, instead of quick bursts that burn more fuel. Check the air in your tires, and keep the engine properly tuned. Great, now I am sounding like the politicians. Heck, we all know how to do it. We learned the methods in high school, and are burdened with even more taxes paying politicians to tell us again. All it takes is a little patriotism in the individuals who make up this great country. If we do not do our part, then we should stop running to the politicians and complaining, because they will not be much help anyway.