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I have been thinking lately about the price of gas. Actually, I have been thinking about it a lot. Not just when I fill up or when my son asks for gas money, but I also think about it when I hear people talking about their solutions to the problem.
One friend bought a motorcycle. He rides it to work, weather permitting. His motorcycle uses much less gas than his pickup truck.
Listening to my brother-in-law talk about his solution was quite interesting. He came up with it while traveling in the Far East. His solution is the scooter. If prices go high enough, he is prepared to commute from Powell to Oak Ridge on a scooter. That is all well and good, but he can’t pull his boat with a scooter. I guess he will have to keep his pickup truck.
A brother-in-law is one thing; a church member is another matter. Less than a week after my conversation with my brother-in-law, I listened to one of my own church members talk with a straight face about the prospects of using a mo-ped to get around Karns. Everything he said made sense, but still I realized this thing was starting to reach crisis proportions.
Is this what it has come to? In the Land of the Free and the Home of the HumVee, they are talking about scooters and mo-peds!
I heard sometime ago about the idea of a one-day gas strike. Somebody picks a day, and all us gas purchasers agree not to purchase any gas on that day. Somehow such an effort would have sent a strong message of consumer unrest to the oil companies. Then the day after the strike all of us gas purchasers would have purchased all the gas we did not purchase the day before, thus sending a message of consumer exuberance to the oil companies. That is just one of the many contradictions in this whole gas price mess.
The latest version of the boycott is directed at Mobil-Exxon. They just replaced Wal-Mart at the top of the latest quarterly earnings report. This is no feat on their part as Wal-Mart had been at the top since just after Noah stepped off the Ark. Well — maybe not that long, but they had been up there for a long time. The main idea of this boycott is for all of us gas purchasers to stop buying gas from Mobil-Exxon until their stations drop the price down to $1.50; the thought there being that if the largest oil company in the world is selling gas for $1.50, then all of their competitors will have to as well.
In Karns, we are talking about the E-Z Stop on Oak Ridge Highway. This is where this boycott idea starts to break down. Some of us who are gas purchasers are also hot dog purchasers and the E-Z Stop makes a pretty good hot dog. I am just not sure the hot dog purchasers are ready to make that kind of sacrifice even if it is for a good cause.
So now we are back to mo-peds and scooters, unless someone has a better idea. I know many of the car manufacturers are putting more and more hybrid cars and even SUVs into production, but that will not get us through the summer. America’s fleet of gasoline engines cannot be converted to an alternative fuel overnight, especially when we have no clear consensus about what the alternative will be.
Mo-peds and scooters may be the short-term solution to this very real, very everyday dilemma. Who knows what we will be driving by the end of the summer! I hear a faint whisper of spiritual guidance from Mammaw, “There is an answer for it in the Bible.” There, of course, I find Jesus walking just about everywhere he went. I think I’ll keep reading. Meanwhile, be on the lookout for scooters in the parking lot.
Joy and Peace,
Ed
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