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Last Updated: Aug 22, 2008 - 12:10:50 AM |
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The price of gas hit a nationwide average of $4 per gallon on Sunday for the first time in history. The most recent government jobs report revealed that unemployment shot up to 5.5 percent with the nation losing 49,000 jobs. The loss is even bigger than that - the economy needs to create 100,000 jobs per month just to keep up with growth. Not only that, but since those numbers were tallied, airlines and automakers announced plans to lay off thousands of workers. As such, those numbers seem poised to get worse.
The price of oil is now dripping down into everything - most disturbing on a visceral level are the price increases in life sustaining necessities such as food and, as we will all soon find out, things like heating oil and natural gas.
Today it is easy to report the bad news - there is much of it, after all, and it is serious. There now seems no way around the predictions that have floated over the past year or so that the U.S. economy is in dire straits as a whole - the price of gas is at the root of many problems.
With few exceptions, the great cities of our nation were built with an endless supply of gasoline in mind. Changing all of that now will be a journey down a long and difficult road. If you are reading this, it is unlikely that you will see an end to the dependence on oil in your lifetime. But hopefully what you will see is a vastly more efficient use and a dramatic conversion to renewable sources of energy. It doesn’t take much thought to realize that placing all of civilization’s cards in a finite commodity is nothing short of insanity.
We are in for some big changes - but that doesn’t even remotely mean that the end of the world is near. It’s not.
Many pundits have blathered on about how the United States will soon become a second tier nation. The rapidly growing economies of Asia are eclipsing ours and soon, we will no longer be a world leader, they say. From my perspective, that is B.S., pure and simple. Again, it is easy to report the bad news.
The United States will not become a second tier nation anytime soon simply because we make stuff here - or rather, we invent stuff. Today, other people in other countries make the stuff we invent. That, however, may change as one of the few blessings of skyrocketing fuel prices. American steel has always been the best in the world - perhaps the cost of importing it from Asia will become so high that our steel industry will once again rise from the ashes. With the falling dollar, many other industries may soon also come back to life. In this case, the dark clouds of a recession most definitely have a silver lining. Religion rarely has a place in an editorial but this is an exception: If there is any nation blessed by God with natural resources and the gift of human resourcefulness, it is the United States. We have everything we need and we have the ability to use it. We need to start using it again.
The U.S. economy is the world’s largest and is highly diverse and complex. At any given point, one sector could be experiencing a boom while another sector believes the sky is falling. And so it is today. We are very fortunate in Iowa - while much of the nation becomes mired in recession, Iowa’s economy is still humming right along. Some local manufacturers are reporting they simply can’t find enough skilled labor to meet their needs. Also, the elected officials here tend to be responsive and responsible.
But most of all, the simple act of living in a rural area may well prove to be our salvation. Our towns are old and were laid out long before cars came into common use. As such, our towns were designed to be self-contained - and perhaps they will be again if the price of fuel keeps going up. More than those living in most large American cities, we can withstand a fuel crisis. And because this area still produces everything from consumer goods to food, we can also withstand an economic crisis. We still make stuff that people need - recession or no recession.
As a nation, we are clearly faced with a few challenges. Certainly the politicians shoulder some of the blame for that. While the fires began in Rome, our elected officials were fiddling over baseball players and steriods. The majority of the responsibility, however, is with us - the citizens. If it has come to pass that corporations and those with deep pockets are being represented over us, the everyday citizens, it is only because we allowed it to happen through apathy or inaction. We the People have the ability to remind the government that they work for us - not the other way around. Regardless, I don’t think anyone should expect the next several years to be business as usual. But I also don’t think we are anywhere near the end of the world. As a nation, we have overcome adversity before. We will do it again. And I am confident that we will emerge better than we were before.
© Copyright 2008 by The East Iowa Herald
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