Daily Blague

The other night, a law school friend who followed the link from "Kathleen in the News," below, gave us a call. She lives with her daughter in the middle of nowhere, and has a daily round-trip commute of sixty miles. With gasoline approaching four dollars a gallon, she is beginning to feel a pinch.

In case you just tuned in, Kathleen and I live in New York City. We haven't owned a car in seven or eight years. ever since we decided that the country-house thing was not working for us. Every once in a while, Kathleen has a car service take her to work, as she does when she leaves the office after ten-thirty at night; but for the most part, she gets to work via public transportation. That's how I get around, too. The automobile, at least in its owned form, is not part of our life. Kathleen hates to drive, moreover, and I really oughtn't to, given the immobility of my neck. We're delighted, in other words, not to have a car.

Our friend's plight, while it reminded me of how lucky Kathleen and I are, because the majority of Americans share it to some degree or another. Assuming that the price of gas continues to rise, at what point will our friend have to find herself a place to live that's closer to her law firm's offices? And who will buy her house? I wonder who would be rash enough to buy her house even now?

The United States imports more than half of the oil that is consumed here, and the percentage will surely rise. The economies of China and India, meanwhile, are swelling their demand for oil. Our present course would appear to be set for a train wreck, even without the bad news previewed in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, which opened yesterday in New York City and Los Angeles. The consequences of ignoring Mr Gore's slide show, of course, will be much worse than a train wreck, and I hope that its power inspires some creative discussion in our rather sclerotic public discourse.