High Gas Prices = Low Regard for Rural Culture

I don’t have any service to haul off my trash; I have to do it in my pickup. I have animals that sometimes need to be transported in a private vehicle to the veterinarian. I work in a semi-rural hospital that is a twenty-minute drive from my door. My partners and I work at all hours of the day and night. (A similar phenomenon exists in local industries such as our regional nuclear power plant.) Shift work is a thing for which even the best (real or theoretical) public transport is often unavailable. I have friends who work in construction jobs which change from month to month. I know elderly persons who live in the country and need to buy groceries or access medical care so they can continue to live independently. More to the point, I know folks with not only children, but limited incomes, for whom $5-a-gallon or higher gasoline would be a crushing economic blow. If folks in rural areas don’t have vehicles, pesky little things such as energy production, manufacturing, and farming won’t happen. Fine dinners in city restaurants would lack a certain ambiance without food and lighting. The belief that $5 or higher gasoline will make us drive less, become more efficient, and convert to better fuels is a bitterly new flavor of anti-rural prejudice. The progressive intolerance of, and antipathy toward, rural people and their cultures reaches a new high when it insists we would all be better off if only we drove less. Ultimately, it implies that we should all move closer to the urban beehive or simply deal with our country perversity and stay on the porch out here in the sticks...more