Andrew's Rants.

I WANT MY NICKELS BACK

When I was a child in the early years of Grade School I remember a lot of news that was delivered to us in a weekly circular called a Weekly Reader. It is what probably made me the news junkie that I am today. In fact I keep the Drudge Report as my homepage on my Internet browser. I can’t turn the fool thing on without
spending a half hour reading the current headlines and clipping the interesting ones to folders on my jump drive to read later in depth. My Weekly reader had up to date stories about President Nixon when he went to China. It was even worded so all of us little screaming idiots in the first grade could understand how important it was for us as Americans to open up new trade avenues so that we would have even more poorly made cheap plastic junk products to buy from yet one more third world underdeveloped country. I remember reading all about the Alaskan pipeline and how it was going to solve the energy crises especially the gas crunch. This was back when there was actually gas rationing and you couldn’t take vacations because of the shortage and people waited hours in line in California to buy gas. This pipeline was supposed to be a modern engineering miracle. It was going to pump billions of barrels of oil down south to the refineries so that America would be freed of its dependence on foreign oil. Each week we would see pictures of this massive pipeline traveling through the wilderness and occasionally there would be the obligatory shot of a polar bear to reassure us that the local wild life was not being harmed by the project. We were all so excited. The news each night went on and on about the gas crunch and how there was no end in sight. We were taught that the oil would run out in just 20 years at the present rate of consumption. Looking back now more than 20 years later I realize it was just supply and demand economics and we the consumer paid the price of international politics shaking hands with the big oil companies.

But back to this pipeline in Alaska. Here we were reading about it each week in our Weekly Reader and watching on TV as various talking heads would expound on their views about how it was going to solve America’s dependency on foreign crude. We were encouraged to collect nickels in a jar and bring them to school so that they could be sent to help fund the pipeline project. That’s right we little first graders were hit up for our candy money and meager allowances to help pay for the Alaskan pipe line. I remember being all worked up to do my part after the pep talk from the Principal in our classroom. I went home and asked my mom for some nickels so I could help America be a great country free from the scourge of foreign oil. She put me to work in the back yard pulling dandelions. We had a bumper crop that year and she told me that for each 50 dandelions I pulled up I would get a nickel. She handed me a fork and showed me how she wanted it done by digging the fork into the ground just below the stem right into the roots and prying upwards so that the roots were yanked up as well, this was to prevent the weed from growing back. I worked like a mad monkey all that weekend and yanked up dandelions by the hundreds. Being only 6 I had no idea of the value of a nickel and its relationship to the work I was putting in. All I knew was that I was working so very hard and that my hard work was going to help America be a better place. My knees were grass stained and my little hands had blisters from prying with the fork over and over again. Monday came and my mother gave me two one dollar bills and told me to have them changed into nickels at Ms. Turners store on the way to school.
I went into the old country store just one block from the school and changed my money into a glorious handful of shiny bright new nickels. I had 40 of them. Forty! I had never seen so many nickels in one place before. I was so excited as I ran on to the school. During the first period the teacher placed a large glass jar on her desk and called each student up where she would count the nickels into the jar and write the total on the board. The first kid up had 5 dollars and placed the entire treasure into the jar I was mortified by how many nickels there were and how hard he must have worked to get that many. But soon I came to realize with a dawning horror that I had been short changed literally by my mother. These kids had just asked their parents for the money and vast sums totaling sometimes more that 20 dollars had been handed over to fill the jar with a virtual fortune by my calculation. They had each not worked one whit for their nickels and as a result it didn’t really matter to them how it was earned or really what it was used for. It was all just a game to them to see if they could outdo one another with their parent’s money. When my turn came I placed my paltry 2 dollars into the jar. Someone sniggered and I felt mad because I had worked my hands until they had blistered digging up over 2000 dandelions by the roots with a small fork. I felt that my portion of the total was just as important as any of theirs even if it wasn’t nearly as much but the snide comments hurt non-the less. The nickels were all taken away and that’s the last I remembered of the incident until this past week. What I want to know now is whatever happened to the oil in that pipeline. Here we are in another gas crunch. It takes me almost 40 dollars to fill my tank as gas nears 2 dollars a gallon here and is already well beyond that in some of the urban areas. Where is all that American oil that was supposed to ease the gas crunch? Why does OPEC even affect us at all? I got to thinking about that pipeline and did some research on the net and found that we are selling all of that oil to Japan and other nations that we have trade agreements with at a far lower cost than what they could purchase it from OPEC. We are practically giving it away and not using it ourselves. Why? Because some environmentalist wacko decided that some chemical levels in the American crude were detrimental to the environment without a variety of pollution controls in the refining process. So the cost to comply with clean air standards when processing the oil would prohibitive. Did they not know this little fact before they started the multibillion-dollar pipeline project?

So to summarize America sells its oil reserves to foreign interest at cut rates while the American consumer (namely me) gets screwed by huge oil companies who are in bed with OPEC and the government. In fact this past quarter Mobil and Exxon both reported all time record profits for their shareholders, yet they claim they are not sticking it to the American consumer and profiting from the higher crude prices. Right, like any of us really believes that. I didn’t used to believe the rhetoric about the government being in on the whole deal and that certain politicians were letting the situation continue because it profited them personally. But now I see how it is and I am no longer blinded by an altruistic belief in my government’s desire for what is best for its citizens. And speaking of innocent altruism I remember that little 6 year old red headed kid who worked so hard for that handful of nickels, so that he could make his world a better place. It was all a scam and I was had. I was taken advantage of and lied to and not one bit of my hard labor and hopes came to anything. Not due to lack of faith and trying but because my teachers my government and my parents all lied to me. The money more than likely went to pay for an expensive lunch on Capitol Hill for a Senator meeting with the President of Mobil Oil and some Sheik while they discussed how to further advance their own bank accounts at the cost of the American public. I tell you what I want! I want my nickels back. That’s right I want my Damn nickels back. Do you hear me George Bush? Nixon can you hear me in your grave? The Exxon Valdez didn’t spill oil along that stretch of coastline it was the black vile blood from the hearts of all those who stole the hopes and dreams of a younger generation all those years ago. I want my 2 dollars in nickels back. GIVE ME BACK MY NICKELS !!!