The Five Stages of Gas Prices

Food prices came down this week in Atlanta. Normally, I don't know the price of nuthin'. If you were to ask me the price of a gallon of milk, I'd have no idea. My wife, however, pulled the Honda Element up to the driveway and said, "come and help me unload"!

Normally, the trunk of the car is full, but this time, the trunk and the back seat were full. It looked like she had bought two months of groceries. "Those prices have been better than a long time, and I figured that we needed to stock up on absolutely everything." So now, the kitchen is overflowing with food -- "strike while the iron is hot" my wife says.

My wife's employers are now starting to require employees to come in twice a week instead of once a week. I'm still permitted to "telecommute", but people seem to be returning back to work, which reminds me of what lead_tag said: after a half-year of Energy Crisis, people have "compensated" and are going right back to their old habits.

He was quite right. Americans will pay $5.50-plus a gallon for gasoline if they absolutely have to. Here's one take on what has happened:

1. Gas prices go up. This isn't the kind of upward creep seen by inflation, rather, this is a "shock" in actuarial terms.
2. Every industry for which the cost of gasoline is the biggest budgetary factor gets hit the hardest. Farming, trucking, fishing, the airline industry all take big hits and prices soar.
3. My wife says that "most people in this country are two paychecks away from being homeless". Some people are about 1/4 of a paycheck away. Everyone living "on the margins" gets squeezed out. People do become homeless, in some cases. People lose jobs.
4. People who aren't wiped out by the shock adjust their budgets to pay $5.50-plus a gallon. Everyone else who was wiped out tries to stand up again.
5. Life returns back to normal.

I agree with this take. This take, however, was found on a right-wing political board. And frankly, I can't find anything wrong with it, except maybe for #5, since we have no guarantee that gas prices will keep falling. However, the price has fallen for the fifth straight week. The last time gas was this low was in June.

Conservatives are already crowing that we've seen "the end of the crisis". "Just a bunch of hippies riled up over nothing -- suck it, libs," was a comment I saw on Fark. Despite the spike in unemployment, despite the increase in homelessness, despite the protests in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago, people want to act as if, frankly, nothing ever happened.

I'll tell you something -- I used to be a nurse. Yep, a nurse, one of those people who take your temperature and pass you the bedpan. I don't like to bring it up, since I got out of that career when it became too stressful. I got to see a lot of people die, and a lot of other people in bad situations, and it made me a believer in Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. I'm a hard core believer. You've heard of the five states of grief, right?

1. Denial: "It can't be happening!"
2. Anger: "How dare you do this to me?"
3. Bargaining: "Just let things be the way they were a little longer!"
4. Depression: "I'm so sad, why do anything?"
5. Acceptance: "I know that things can be better, but they will be different."

These stages can be applied to just about any personal loss. They don't always happen in this order, and people move back and forth between them, but I've seen them happen. Hell, there are people in this country still in the "anger" stage that black and women have civil rights!

For the last seven months, most of us have been in the "denial" stage. I've been thinking that "prices are going to come down sometime" for the last seven months. A few people -- people generally who are early adapters -- got a chance to hit the "anger" stage, where you saw all that chaos. But now, things are starting to settle down. We haven't hit the "Mad Max" stage just yet, which is good as there's an election around the corner.

Even liberals are pretty much still in denial. I keep reading about how this spike in prices was a "scheme".

The idea being that Texas doesn't have much of an oil industry anymore. (Remember the comic figure of the Texas oilman? Remember "Dallas"?) It's not that the oil in Texas has dried up, or anything. Rather, the oil is so hard to get that before the "shock", the amount of money you got for drilling for oil didn't offset the high price of pulling it out of the ground, not with the price of a barrel of oil what it was. Now, with oil prices almost double what they were in April, it has now become worthwile to start drilling. This has made some people in Texas very, very happy, as they have been paid big bucks to squeeze that harder-to-get oil out of the ground. Whether anyone sees any of that oil doesn't matter now -- they've been paid to look for it, and that's all that matters.

Myself -- I don't believe it. That's too much of a "conspiracy", and the problem with grandiose conspiracies like that is they don't work because that many people can't keep their mouths shut. But even among people formerly sympathetic to the need to change our wasteful lifestyles, there's a reversion to "let's wait till tomorrow".

(* * *)

My wife suggested that maybe we should take in a border. We have a guest room. Furthermore, I have contacts at Georgia State University. We could house one of the many Chinese graduate students that come to GSU.

My response? "Let's wait and see. We'll only do that if gasoline hits $7 a gallon."