While some Americans may be reducing their travel this summer due to gas prices, make no mistake, America is still a nation on the move. According to Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s David Green, even if fuel prices doubled, we’d only see approximately a five percent decrease in demand, and based on current traffic levels, it looks like business as usual across our busy continent.
Apparently, some Americans think paying high fuel prices is just the cost of doing business.
And that, of course, is the key phrase. Doing business.
In America, it’s all about doing business and doing business whatever the cost. To create profits, we destroy habitat, deplete aquifers, unleash the war machine on nations with resources we covet and pay lip service to the immigration problem since it provides cheap labor for greedy profiteers.
After all, who’s going to cut the grass and serve your burgers?
Once again this summer, Americans are on the move. They’re loading up the SUV’s and the RV’s, heading to theme parks, national parks and ballparks, commuting to work, driving to malls and burning that precious and all important commodity along the way. 1.51 billion liters per day, to be exact.
And while little Jimmy is happily watching a movie in the back of the Yukon and munching on french fries, the civilian death total rises in Iraq (37,918 and 42,228 civilians killed), and the national tab for all the bloodshed moves close to $300 billion.
In the meantime, back in the Delta, the writer is lyin’ low and in place, tending the garden, watching the birds, repairing bicycles, attempting to finish a stack of books and keep my mind off of the imminent calamities. I desperately miss the mountains, cool springs and towering trees, just as I miss so many of my friends in far away places. But I rarely venture beyond my garden or where my bike can take me these days, opting for the quiet of home and eschewing the mania of travel in our so-called advanced society.
You see, there are no threats in my garden, unless you count the occasional red wasp (Polistes carolina), and the only real threats to national security are ignorance and the politico-industrialists that feed on ignorance.
