Runnin’ on Empty September

Runnin’ on Empty

Conversations with Caren Black on the View from Oil’s Peak

September

Can You Hear Me Now?

Can You Hear Me Now??

Cause we live in an age of ill communication and we Live in a rage of killing time. But then we look to the sage inside our television and We wonder why life has passed us by.

—Nina Storey, “Ill Communication”, 2001

My pre-Katrina morning’s email contained several “Forwarded” delights urging me to sign a petition to the president demanding that gas prices be lowered and soliciting my support of a day-long boycott at the gas pump. Obviously, the perceptually challenged had been home with nothing to do last night.

Hel— lo?

“A quarter of our oil and gas production comes from the Gulf. Katrina shut down 92 percent of the oil and 83 percent of the natural gas production, according to the federal officials.” (TIME.com, August 30) Said Michael Englund, chief economist with Action Economics, "Going into the hurricane we had a shortage of refining capacity anyway. This just throws a hand grenade into the already delicate balance." (CNNMoney, August 30) Since August 2, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been “calling for a 95% to 100% chance of an above-normal 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.” While I write this, more people than ever are dying and homeless (not just in the U.S.), crude has peaked at over $70 per barrel, whole oil platforms are missing in the Gulf, airlines are threatened, and this is just the beginning.

Meanwhile, the terminally torpid get all bent out of shape by gas prices which are, in actuality, being kept artificially low through the use of an old reliable additive: blood. They shoot hopelessly ignorant emails into cyberspace and feel the surge of self-righteous American entitlement pumping through their veins.

These cyber-protesters are on dangerous, delusional ground. Dangerous, because “The federal government is going after nonviolent protesters…. felony prosecutions are part of a growing crackdown on civil disobedience protests.” (Bill Neal, August 31) Delusional because they weren’t planning to abstain from food, clothing, shelter and children, just gasoline.

It’s not only cars that run on fossil fuels, you know. Six-and-one-half billion of us eat, clothe, warm and cool ourselves, and continue to reproduce because of oil and gas, its byproduct. Before oil, the earth could feed just over one billion with nearly twice the topsoil we have left today, due to depletion, erosion and paving-over. Now we face feeding six times the people on half the soil without oil, redeveloping discarded manual technologies and hybriding them with rationed electricity. Dang! Guess a lot can happen while we’re preoccupied working to keep both the SUV and the Starbuck’s card full.

The “What? Me worry?” A.E. Newmanites believe that coal or some yet-to-be-discovered deus-ex-machina resource will save us. Maybe they can put lumps of coal in their gardens. Maybe then we won’t have so many Newmanites.

“Hel-lo?” What is the matter with us??

In the checkout line at Fred Meyers recently, my cashier swiped an item several times without result. “Isn’t that frustrating?” I commiserated. The nice lady agreed. Trying one more time with no rewarding “beep,” she set the item aside. Checking out my other purchases, she periodically swiped the incorrigible item, then set it aside again. My attention wandered, but when I looked back, the item was in a bag. “Finally worked?” “Yes,” she smiled, “They do that.”

It occurs to me that technology is one reason most people aren’t “takin’ it to the streets.” We’ve become conditioned to accept things that, for no apparent reason, don’t work the way they’re supposed to. Intermittent NON-reinforcement, resulting first in frustration, then anger, finally “Learned Helplessness” with its numbing sense that we have control over very little in our lives, has damaged our impulse to rebel -- though it’s done wonders for the sale of Viagra.

We’re powerless to prevent or diagnose our computer’s crashing (other than to know it will happen at the worst possible time), though we’re still responsible for what we produce on it. We’ve learned to ignore red blinking digital clocks we don’t have time to reset. We’re accustomed to phone “conversations” with machines which compel us to press number after number, listen to recorded blatherings and even redial to go through the whole demoralizing process again when they cut us off. If our TV remote doesn’t work, it may not even occur to us that we could fix it by changing the batteries.

My professor for reading pedagogy instructed us to teach children to “look for meaning in the text.” She eschewed the old primary readers filled with nonsense rhymes (“The goat sat in a boat wearing a coat.”) in favor of “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? I see a red bird looking at me.” When the child misreads “brid” we ask, “Does that make sense? What is a “brid”? What does it mean? What word that looks like this would make sense? Sound it out.”

Americans now believe in brids. We’re sure we’ve seen ‘em. As part of a great techno-numbing-down, we don’t even question them. We sit as though with barcodes tattooed beneath our hairline and put up with the unacceptable because we don’t know what’s wrong nor how to fix it. We can’t even get to the “its,” which are under the control of faceless, soulless corporate “beings” whose rights exceed our own and who lie to us with impunity for profit.

Like the cyber-protesters above, we’ve given up trying to comprehend the true situation and reduced ourselves to junior-high-level solutions out of a need to make noise against our lack of control.

Old joke: “Why are you beating your head against the wall?” “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

Hel-lo? Think it might be time to stop yet? Ever get the feeling that if your life pace gets any faster, you’ll be in orbit? Is all the cheap plastic crap you’ve accumulated really worth it?

We’re out of oil. We’ve entered a period of escalating crises from which we quite obviously cannot rescue people. The facts are heedless of our denial: Life as we’ve known it is over. The warnings have gone out, but like too many in New Orleans, we’re refusing to evacuate a way of life that’s toast and move on to safer ground.

Can you hear me now?