The fable of the grasshopper and the ant: The ants work hard during the summer to prepare their colony for the winter. The grasshopper, lounging under a nearby tree, laughs at them for working when they could be relaxing, or playing. When the winter comes, the ants are prepared, and the grasshopper is not. He must beg them for assistance to survive the winter.
The fable, along with the
Faustian Bargain, are two of the most relevant metaphors of our current economic situation. What the ants did was called
planning, a responsibility that even real-life, non-anthropomorphized animals, such as squirrels, undertake. Planning is something we did not do nearly enough of when the "weather" was nice and gas was cheap.
People forget that there are real consequences to their decisions. We are experiencing the real consequences now of every politically-motivated decision to allow sprawl to creep gallons of gas away from anything else, to let our passenger railroad wither on tracks owned by freight companies who care little about Amtrak as long as it pays rent, to turn transportation policy at all levels of government into a feeding trough for highway-building interests, and to allow the previously-externalized costs of our economic, fiscal, and environmental irresponsibility to bundle up and come crashing down on our unprepared society like the Yucatan Peninsula asteroid believed to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species in the Cretaceous Period.
Our reaction to these consequences has been that of struggling and scampering, affirming Carter-administration Energy Secretary James R. Schlesinger's quote that "we have only two modes: complacency and panic". We are doing rational self-rationing that might have been mitigated had we planned better. We are substituting lower-quality for higher-quality foods, the gas-station-quality, preservative-laden ham for the hams sold in authentic delis. We are driving and flying less (a boon for climate change and air quality and people's lungs) and staying in more. High school kids are curtailing their cruising. Police patrols are being cut back. Municipalities at the sub-prime mortgage crisis ground zero are going bankrupt, while others are raising taxes to pay for services, further cutting into families' disposable incomes. The airline industry is in a well-known downward spiral.
In Wilmington, NC, a few months ago, motorists eschewed honesty while swarming a gas station accidentally selling gas for $0.35 per gallon. Car dealerships are dangling free gas or "$2.99 gas guarantees" to try and unload their rapidly devaluing gas guzzlers. The cargo trucking industry is in a tailspin, as the boastful, red-white-and-blue signs on the backs of tractor-trailers contending that "without trucks, America stops" begin to ring true in a nation that has shunned local self-reliance for a dependency on the unsustainable global marketplace.
Now we have finally started to undertake serious planning for high energy costs, and those who have never shied from spitting on environmentalism are beginning to fight for some marginal turf on the growing isle of conservation consciousness.
