The Gasoline Crisis.....of 1979
I’ve been a bad girl! There have been no new writings in my blog in days! I was on hiatus! OK, I really wasn’t, but I feel the need to lie. Before that, I was away. That part is true, though. I want to say that the blissful state in which I returned to work a week ago, following my visit to the Hershey Spa, is to blame for my inability to write, but why lie (I did that before - look up!). Truth is I’ve been lazy. Finally, I am back at the keyboard!
Nothing says, “You’re getting old” faster than when you realize you’re living through something you went through years ago. This current, seemingly unending, concern with fuel and energy costs and the domination of the topic in our media, is not the first, but the second crisis of this nature in my lifetime.
During my first crisis, in the mid- to late 1970s, our country was more concerned with oil shortage than with rising oil prices. There was a fear of running out that was ever present. Rising energy costs, decreased supplies and regional droughts pushed up food prices back then, too. I even recall my mother trying to make us drink this gross concoction in place of real milk. It was a cream colored powder in a brown and yellow can with the word KLIM on it. Milk spelled backwards. Ha, ha! I did not find it funny at all. In protest, I stopped drinking "milk" all together. However, that 'punishment' for my mother was having zero effect on her, but was making me miserable. In hindsight, I would have been better off holding my nose and downing that drink. Ech! Even thinking about it makes me puke!
I suspect now, though she never actually said it to us, that the high costs of milk was preventing them from buying the gallon of milk I was so used to seeing in our refrigerator. Times were tough all around but nothing pulls the memory back like the current fuel crisis we’re having right now.
I remember one night, the first of many, being startled awake by a honking horn and its piercing thick drone leaving short echoes in its wake. I was next to my brother in the back seat of my father’s light green Ford Falcon wondering how exactly I got out of my bed and ended up in the car. Our parents sat in the front seat, still in darkness of night, waiting on an impossibly long line of cars at a gas station. It must be Even day, I thought, though I wasn’t entirely sure of what that meant. I was still a kid, but I was old enough to grasp the concept of how things were being handled to ensure a controlled chaos during the crisis. A system of odd and even gas days, where drivers were to fill up only on days when their license plates ended with the right number, was implemented. My dad’s plate ended in even because I kept hearing them plan for the even days as it were an upcoming wedding.
There had been another such crisis in 1973, but being just three years old at the time, and a new sister as well, memories of that one are non-existent. What is existent today is the sinking feeling I had back then, in the car with my parents, worried about something that was completely out of my control.
Today, as I watch the gas prices jump by pennies and nickels almost daily, I recall how worried I was then because I knew my parents were worried sick about something called OPEC and a terrible place called Iran and some awful man referred to as the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Though my parents tried to shield us from the reality of the situation, kids are extremely perceptive. We took cues from whatever vibes our parents were putting out there, whether on purpose or not. We read body language and sense apprehension in them. That, plus it was weird to go for a ride in the dead of night just to go wait at a gas station.
It disgusts me that we seem to never learn our lesson regarding fuel and energy. We somehow return to the same pitfalls and errors of the past. We don’t learn from our mistakes. We live in a perpetual state of dependency on other countries, (nations we refer to as allies when they’re merely fuel providers to our leaders) to meet our incessant thirst for the liquid gold that fuels our lives. We are trying to meet that almighty oil quota that keeps us happy. The whole, sordid mess is getting old fast.
I am sick and tired of going to the gas station knowing I will drive away a lot more poor than when I arrived. I am tired of needing to do things and considering the impact on my purse. I am tired of living in a country run by clowns. I am tired of knowing that the nations who hate us most hold all the cards because they know, better than we ourselves admit, just how dependent we are on oil.
What I hope happens when the new president takes office, whomever the “people” elect, is that he will take a good hard look, followed by an equally firm step, toward resolving our dependency on foreign oil by replacing it with viable, economically sound and realistic fuel alternatives. Of course, I am neither politically inclined, nor poltically enthusiastic to make any kind of difference one way or the other. I am just hoping for four years of relative calmness both here and around the globe. I am hoping that the babies born today won't ever find themselves in a back seat of a car in the dead of night waiting on a long line to get a little bit of liquid gold in the car!
Hey, I said I hope!
Nothing says, “You’re getting old” faster than when you realize you’re living through something you went through years ago. This current, seemingly unending, concern with fuel and energy costs and the domination of the topic in our media, is not the first, but the second crisis of this nature in my lifetime.
During my first crisis, in the mid- to late 1970s, our country was more concerned with oil shortage than with rising oil prices. There was a fear of running out that was ever present. Rising energy costs, decreased supplies and regional droughts pushed up food prices back then, too. I even recall my mother trying to make us drink this gross concoction in place of real milk. It was a cream colored powder in a brown and yellow can with the word KLIM on it. Milk spelled backwards. Ha, ha! I did not find it funny at all. In protest, I stopped drinking "milk" all together. However, that 'punishment' for my mother was having zero effect on her, but was making me miserable. In hindsight, I would have been better off holding my nose and downing that drink. Ech! Even thinking about it makes me puke!
I suspect now, though she never actually said it to us, that the high costs of milk was preventing them from buying the gallon of milk I was so used to seeing in our refrigerator. Times were tough all around but nothing pulls the memory back like the current fuel crisis we’re having right now.
I remember one night, the first of many, being startled awake by a honking horn and its piercing thick drone leaving short echoes in its wake. I was next to my brother in the back seat of my father’s light green Ford Falcon wondering how exactly I got out of my bed and ended up in the car. Our parents sat in the front seat, still in darkness of night, waiting on an impossibly long line of cars at a gas station. It must be Even day, I thought, though I wasn’t entirely sure of what that meant. I was still a kid, but I was old enough to grasp the concept of how things were being handled to ensure a controlled chaos during the crisis. A system of odd and even gas days, where drivers were to fill up only on days when their license plates ended with the right number, was implemented. My dad’s plate ended in even because I kept hearing them plan for the even days as it were an upcoming wedding.
There had been another such crisis in 1973, but being just three years old at the time, and a new sister as well, memories of that one are non-existent. What is existent today is the sinking feeling I had back then, in the car with my parents, worried about something that was completely out of my control.
Today, as I watch the gas prices jump by pennies and nickels almost daily, I recall how worried I was then because I knew my parents were worried sick about something called OPEC and a terrible place called Iran and some awful man referred to as the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Though my parents tried to shield us from the reality of the situation, kids are extremely perceptive. We took cues from whatever vibes our parents were putting out there, whether on purpose or not. We read body language and sense apprehension in them. That, plus it was weird to go for a ride in the dead of night just to go wait at a gas station.
It disgusts me that we seem to never learn our lesson regarding fuel and energy. We somehow return to the same pitfalls and errors of the past. We don’t learn from our mistakes. We live in a perpetual state of dependency on other countries, (nations we refer to as allies when they’re merely fuel providers to our leaders) to meet our incessant thirst for the liquid gold that fuels our lives. We are trying to meet that almighty oil quota that keeps us happy. The whole, sordid mess is getting old fast.
I am sick and tired of going to the gas station knowing I will drive away a lot more poor than when I arrived. I am tired of needing to do things and considering the impact on my purse. I am tired of living in a country run by clowns. I am tired of knowing that the nations who hate us most hold all the cards because they know, better than we ourselves admit, just how dependent we are on oil.
What I hope happens when the new president takes office, whomever the “people” elect, is that he will take a good hard look, followed by an equally firm step, toward resolving our dependency on foreign oil by replacing it with viable, economically sound and realistic fuel alternatives. Of course, I am neither politically inclined, nor poltically enthusiastic to make any kind of difference one way or the other. I am just hoping for four years of relative calmness both here and around the globe. I am hoping that the babies born today won't ever find themselves in a back seat of a car in the dead of night waiting on a long line to get a little bit of liquid gold in the car!
Hey, I said I hope!
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