It’s fashionable this election season to complain that gas prices are high.

Cry me a river.

I can remember when we had to wait in line for 20-30 minutes – or even for hours – for 5 gallons of gas. The price of gas was about what it is now, in inflation-adjusted dollars, but the mileage of ordinary American vehicles was only one-third of today’s mileage. The result was that the effective price of driving your car was triple what it is now – if you could stay in line long enough to get gas for it.

And then, this car unsafe at any speed could kill you or kill itself, but that’s a different story.

The gas crunch of the 1970s produced two dramatic effects. One, people started shopping for smaller cars that got better gas mileage. Two, people started driving less.

Today, I see evidence of neither. I’ll start to worry about gas prices when Joe Sixpack trades in his People Rammer 450, or whatever they’re called.

Meanwhile, maybe it will help you to know we have bigger problems than gas prices. Here’s an incomplete listing:

Iran might get The Bomb. In our obsession to get gas prices down, we might choose to end the Iran task prematurely. That may well get the price of gas down from $4.46 a gallon to $3.89 a gallon – Halleluiah! – but at the cost of nuking Atlanta, NYC, DC, San Francisco, Jerusalem, Paris and London.  

AI is getting too smart. While ignorant fad-meisters complain that data centers in the middle of nowhere might produce a noise nobody is there to hear, we continue at breakneck, break-civilization speed to advance an intelligence that we’ve dubbed “artificial.” If only this artificial intelligence had an artificial heart and an artificial conscience, too.

It doesn’t.

So, let’s hope that people who are real smart are in charge.

They’re not.

The solution, of course, is not to abandon AI technology. If we don’t adopt this technology, then someone else will – who will use it to own us, like the Chinese. The solution instead is to somehow, in some way, do it right. But we have a bleak history lately of doing things right.

While AI is getting too smart, our children are getting too stupid. Objective data in the form of test scores show they never recovered from Covid. In our zeal to protect them from a disease to which they were nearly immune, we destroyed the educational system.

Our solution to these declining test scores, comically, is to make the tests easier.

But the teachers’ unions did fine and the woke professors did fine. Maybe it was a success, after all!

Our $40 trillion deficit. It’s easy to think deficits are a way of life for America. They’re not. As recently as the turn of the century, Bill Clinton was running a federal surplus and we were on our way to eliminating the federal deficit.

It didn’t happen. And it evidently won’t, until it’s too late.

Socialism. Our increasing population of stupid people with declining test scores are again finding the opiate of stupid masses – socialism. The totalitarian economic policies of Lenin, Chavez, Mao and Pol Pot are once again all the rage. Maybe those policies will be tossed on the ash heap of fashion (again) before they murder a hundred million people (again). Or maybe this time it will require a full billion.

We are not reproducing. Given that one of my earlier compaints was that our children are too stupid, this sounds like the old complaint about a restaurant: “The food was terrible and the portions were too small.” But yes, given the millions or billions that will die of socialism, we should be having more children. We aren’t. Globally, our rate of reproduction is barely at replacement level. In our most advanced cultures, it’s far below that.

At this rate, Europe, Asia and America north of the Rio Grande will become near-extinct in a time frame when your descendants will still know who you were (not that they will care). Long before that, your vaunted Western Civilization will be a dot in the rear-view mirror of your descendants’ horse and buggy.

Yet, here we are with elections approaching and our number one worry is that the price of gas went up a buck a gallon.

I have only one conclusion: We deserve what we get.