Out of Gas

Spring is here and Summer is right around the corner. Time for picnics, barbecues, and beach parties! It's also time for the gas prices to skyrocket. The weather shift will mean more people will want to get out of the house, which means heavier driving. Long drives to the beach or the amusement park, road trips, vacations, people are driving... a lot. This all leads to the insane gas prices we all love to hate. I can talk about the corruption of big oil, I can talk about how unfair the prices really are, but I'm not. Today I'm going to talk about how we have no one to blame but ourselves.

How can we be to blame? It's the oil companies that blast the prices up. They claim shortages, they claim higher demand, they claim high barrel prices, they claim many things and still gross billions of dollars. How can we not be angry with them? These people grab every dollar they can from us, they inflate their prices and make lame excuses without even trying to hide the ridiculous amounts of profit. But here's the cold hard truth, we let them do it.

It's one thing to be angry at these people for taking advantage of us. It's a completely different thing to be angry and do something about it. This is basic economics, supply and demand. They have the gas, we want it. For as long as we ask for it, and accept their prices, they can get away with the insane prices. But this simple principal of economics can work in our favor, we have power. We need to stop the demand...

I've seen it attempted, many times. I've seen the desperate attempt to get a massive gas boycot going for just one day. I've seen the power of the internet fail on getting the word out, I've seen radio ads fail, I've seen newspaper fail. We as a nation seem to rather bitch and accept it, than for one day not drive, for one day show big oil that we don't want their prices, that we don't absolutely need the fuel they charge so highly for. One day, it's all it would take, one day if everyone just stopped, if everyone just walked, carpooled, used public transportation, it would decimate the gas companies. It would work, with nobody buying the gas companies would begin hemorrhaging money, they would be forced to lower prices. We seem to forget that in this system of capitalism that it is not just the corporation that runs the show, we all have the ability to control what we get and how we get it.

Just have to stand up and walk.