Wake up!

Petrol costs more than gasoline but it’s still too cheap. They are of course two names for the same thing. Gasoline (US) has always been cheaper than petrol (UK). We don’t have our own oil-wells. When the price really goes up it will hurt, but life on Earth will improve. Communities will be restored, obesity will diminish, air will be less toxic, people will appreciate their home village, global warming will stop getting worse, scars of the world-wide ugliness caused by the motor car will gradually heal. And we will still have the Internet!

To ensure the peaceful restoration of a saner life style, we have to avoid these bitter wars for control of oil supplies. Our dependence is our fatal weakness. Three or four years ago, in Britain, some truck drivers complained about a tax on fuel and decided to take direct action by blockading the oil refineries, interrupting the distribution of petrol and diesel fuel. Within a week it was a national emergency. The crisis was made worse by drivers filling their tanks at every opportunity, guaranteeing that supplies ran out at every filling station except just after a tanker delivery. It was difficult to maintain priority supplies for buses, ambulances and police vehicles. Police intervention was needed to prevent traffic jams and disputes, and to monitor new regulations to protect essential services.

All this was brought about by a dozen truck drivers whose cause gained sympathy. Less bloody than terrorist bombs but more effective. Governments have bombs and practise terrorism with impunity, whilst defining the word to exclude what they do. I don’t know of any government that has learned lessons from Gandhi.

If we accepted that oil may get scarce, and organised accordingly, we could spare ourselves all this self-inflicted pain and chaos. But it’s an emotive thing and those politicians who can see what’s happening cannot do anything because it would lose them votes.

The alternative is to learn the hard way. This is what is happening. It could go on and on, not getting better till after it has got much worse.

The above rant is not my main theme, merely a concrete example. My theme is waking up, for we sleepwalk through life, aided by money and security. We insulate ourselves in our symbolic 4-wheel-drive vehicles, and it’s like driving around in a tank through enemy territory. I forget the currently fashionable name of these cars, for I sometimes hold the 21st century at arm’s length, as if it were a venom-spitting snake.

Awake, O America! Not just America of course, you are role-model to a host of emulators. Perhaps you know the ugliness and indignity of poverty because it is not unknown within your borders. But do you know poverty’s sweeter tang, the keenness of its senses, the brilliant clarity of its thoughts, when one walks the earth naked like an Aboriginal – of whatever race – or like Adam? Do Jews believe in the Fall of Man, wherein Adam and Eve contracted the disease called Original Sin, so soon after the Garden of Eden was planted for their benefit?

It’s cultivated, bleached and refined sin that poisons us today. There is one great hypocritical, smiley-faced sin: to sleepwalk through life!