by Zach Bigalke

Created on: May 08, 2007   Last Updated: May 16, 2007

I received an email from my mother the other day which talked about a national boycott of the gas pumps on 15 May 2007. Basically, the argument goes that if every person on the internet who receives this letter refuses to buy gasoline on the fifteenth, then the petroleum conglomerates will stand to lose somewhere around three billion dollars of daily revenue. Citing that a similar April 1997 boycott had yielded an immediate thirty-cent drop per gallon, it appears that the original author is attempting to get their own gas price lowered on a specific day so that they can fill up on the cheap accordingly.

I applaud this move. Hell, I probably won't buy gas on 15 May...I don't drive much, anyway. Melanie needs our car to transport between work and home. I have a bicycle. It gets the job done, and I am never a slave to the gas pump - just the bike shops which keep me in tubes and tires and chain grease. But I will not be boycotting in a mass drive to lower our prices. Americans need to wake up and realize that they cannot have everything their way. They can't always have the world's wealthiest people and the world's cheapest gasoline. We pay on average two to three times less at the pump than do Europeans; there, a mutual multinational collaborative effort emphasizes mass transportation, bicycles and smaller ultra-efficient automobiles. When they fuel up they understand that they are using a finite luxury whose time on this planet is fast departing. Americans, raised on their motorists' Manifest Destiny of the open road, continue to guzzle gasoline as if some scientist will discover a way for us to piss the stuff out aplenty.

The only way that we will create new oil is to die and get tilled under in some mass extinction. And our stampede through the globe's remaining reserves only hastens that inevitability. Our collective home - the only home we have - has survived various extinctions in its four-billion years of existence. It has amazing regenerative powers, aligning and realigning its tectonic plates in a constant home redecoration. The meager lifespan of humans or any other animal is far too short to detect these minute changes. But a planet lives on far longer than any species that might chance to inhabit its surface, air or interior. And we must all return back into the bosom of mother Earth eventually...

Please, if all that motivates chances to be the price of petroleum at the pump, then by all means refrain from filling up the tank on the fifteenth of

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