Dragon and the Hydra

Here in North America, deafening roar can be heard by those who care to listen. It is a horrible, painful wail of despair, agony and pain. The noise is made by a monster created by men, and it is a Hydra with billions of heads: it is the poor driver who delivers pizzas and can no longer make his living because the gas prices eat away his salary. It is the housewife driving a monstrous SUV vehicle that is now eating away the household budget for groceries in its thirst for gas. It is the magazine articles on my daily paper where the people bemoan the high cost of gasoline. It is the witch hunt that has started in United States against oil companies. It is the great corporations whose profit margins are hit by the people’s disposable income being eaten away by the gasoline prices. It is the motorists now raiding the gas stations in US, stealing gas from the pumps, thus depriving livelihoods of the station owners. It is the poor freezing pensioner whose life savings can no longer pay of the skyrocketing heating costs. It is the driver who runs out of gas on purpose on the road to get free lift from emergency services. It is the veteran selling his watch in a pawnshop to get more money for gasoline. The Monster screams from the headlines of CNN where the US consumers are in militant mood, it jumps at me from my daily magazines where clueless politicians blather about replacing oil with hydrogen or coal.

It seems incredible that the people across the world are so surprised about the high oil and gasoline prices. But you must understand that the Monster is an addict of colossal proportions, whose vast appetite the current 84 million barrels of oil we now frantically pump every day cannot slake. Its whole existence is built on cheap, unlimited, everlasting oil. Nothing else will do.

The Monster screams and screams for more and more cheap oil. It will kill to get it. It already does in the Middle East, and it will kill more. It will kill anyone and anything standing on its way: humans, caribou of the ANWAR, it will even kill itself. In its terrible withdrawal pains it rends and tears its own flesh, not realizing that it is hurting itself. The time of cheap oil is over. The monster must give up its addiction, but it will not do so without a fight.

The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked but nothing could stem the avalanche. For without fuel they were nothing. They had built a house of straw.

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