Atlanta never seems to be short on shortages. First there was the water crisis, where we basically had 60 days of drinking water left in the lake thanks to the Corps of Engineers draining Lanier’s levels well below normal so that some “endangered” mussels in Florida that weren’t even native to that area could live. We’ve got school-system budget crunches. Clear air quality's in short supply. Nobody could find a Wi last Christmas for their kids. And now, we don’t have any fuel at our gas stations. This is what you see everywhere:
It’s getting bad. They say relief is on the way as the Hurricane Ike-ravaged part of the Gulf is starting to return to normal levels of oil production, but for now, if we were all wearing leather, and everybody drove like me, I’d swear we were living in Mad Max’s world. Because people are acting like Road Warriors while waiting in the Jimmy Carterish-length lines of your local Shell station.
Case in point: My wife recently sat in line of a pre-pay only station where the max they’d let you put in was $30. After waiting forty-five minutes, she finally was next in line for the pump, when some Lexus-driving “lady” tried to cut right in front of her and the other patient people lined up behind her. My wife inched as close as she could to the car filling up and walked into the cashier to pre-pay, where the “lady” tried to cut in front of her in that line too. The “lady” abruptly said she was next, and my wife corrected her, saying she’d been waiting for some time. The “lady” said she had to hurry and get to the airport, to which my wife explained she needed to hurry and get home so I could leave for a meeting downtown.
The “lady” then proceeded to call my wife a “funny bunny.” Only, it wasn’t “funny bunny.” But the first two letters of the first word she used were the same as in funny, and the second word started with a “b” and had the same number of letters as bunny. The clerk at the store summed it up best: “That was not very lady-like.”
Fortunately, it did not come to blows (I’d have bet the farm on my wife, BTW). But that hasn’t been the case at many other gas stations. People are punching each other out over gas. Why is there such a panic and so much turmoil? For one, people are addicted to their cars. Second, it’s hard to get around anywhere in Atlanta with less than a half-tank of gas. But third, and overall, we don’t know how to deal with crises any more. And by “we” I mean the consumer(ing) generations of America.
My grandfather’s generation dealt with two World Wars and the Great Depression. They were tough. But since then? We’re all soft. Baby boomers had Vietnam and Korea, which had horrible repercussions on many soldiers and their families, but collectively as a nation, it didn’t impact us greatly. The black community boomers fought bravely through civil rights, but again, as an entire nation, we didn’t suffer through that all together—there were too many white bystanders. The worst we Gen X and Yers have had to deal with was the Spice Girls. The problem is, it didn’t build much character in us to face the tougher challenges awaiting us down the road. If anything, it just acclimated us to bad music so the Pussycat Dolls could rise to fame.
You could argue 9/11. But it was an isolated event. It crushed the spirit of NYC, and halted everyone across the U.S. for several days, but overall, only NYC continued to feel the deep repercussions over time. And it seems that now, just seven brief years later, we’ve forgotten the lessons learned. So while it was a brief national crisis, it was more geographically isolated in nature. The same could be said for Hurricane Katrina. Or wildfires in California. The two Iraq Wars and Afghanistan, like ‘Nam and Korea, have affected us politically, economically, at the pump, and at the individual family or hometown levels, but hasn’t brought us to our knees from a full-fledged iron-booted kick to the collective groin of our nation (in terms of geography, where would that be… Oklahoma?) just like any other of this stuff.
Overall, we’ve had to endure nothing long-term (fortunately for us, the third album was a flop and we could move ahead unhindered). What will happen when something serious drops on us? Will this economic crisis make an Armageddon out of life as we know it right now? Maybe we’ll end up living in a place like Beyond Thunderdome. Or worse yet, the post-Apocalyptic world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
I sure hope not. But I can’t dwell on it long. I’m on “E” (which here lately means less than half-a-tank) and need to go find some gas. I’ll be like Max and bring a sawed-off shotgun and dog along with me though, just to be safe. Or my wife.
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