Last (Wednesday) night about 8 p.m., my wife and I drove six miles to meet her aunt for dinner. Along the way we passed nine gas stations. All of them had lines out onto the highway. The biggest line we saw was about a quarter mile long.
This (Thursday) morning 5 a.m. I rode my bicycle to my favorite national chain convenience store for cigs (I know, I know). They are out of gas and don't expect any more until Monday at the earliest.
I rode about 3/4 mi. to the gas station at the entrance of Universal Studios Orlando. No gas, maybe Monday. Three miles further down on International Drive, with about 80,000 hotel rooms priced for families of four from Ohio, same story at all three gas stations I checked.
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We're about five miles from the entrance of Walt Disney World. Within a five-mile radius of my home, about 110,000 tourists are still asleep in hotel rooms, campers, vacation homes and in-laws' fold-out sleeper-couches.
About 30,000 of them -- from the Midwest, the northeast and the southeast (in that order) will head home today. Of them, almost 20,000 will drive off in about 8,000 vehicles if today's an average day. They're all going to find plastic convenience store bags wrapped around gas pump handles.
Florida is utterly dependent on tourism. There are other businesses, some of which aren't even tourism-related. But the vast majority of human beings who live here owe their livelihoods (such as it is, with $6.50 hourly salaries and a median house price of $235,000) to people who come here for family vacation.
So Florida has made sure major tourism transportation routes -- like the Ronald Effing Reagan Florida Turnpike that runs all the way up to Akron, Ohio -- are well-supplied with gas. Or at least they used to before the neocons took over.
As 30,000 or so tourists start their drive home later today, they'll pass another 30,000 or so (a few more, holiday weekend and all) who are checking in.
That is, if there's gas. Not just gas here. Gas in Macon, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Lexington, Cincinnati... and a reasonable assumption (or devil-may-care) there will be gas all the way down, even at $3 and $4 and....
Every single one of those 60,000 people traveling either way today is enjoying a far more bountiful life than more than a million of our fellow Americans in Louisiana-Mississippi -- about the same distance away many of them will travel.
Such difficulties they will experience finding gas to get here (or to get home) aren't life-threatening or even life-changing. Cancellation of my own planned trip -- to buy a dozen Barbados cherry plants and some loquat tree budstock in Frostproof, about 50 miles away - seems so trifling I'm feeling guilty having planned it, though that was weeks ago.
But here, deep in the heart of Clear Channel country, where right-wing hate talk monopolizes the public airwaves 24 hours a day weekdays (on the weekends, it's infomercials for Viagra substitutes and engine oil treatments), where the local sheriff commands a secret army of homeland security thugs and a big chunk of the bin Laden family boarded for home after Sept. 11, the ripple effects of our disastrous national malign -- the great "Duh" period of modern American history -- are about to make themselves evident in ways the deliberately ignorant and the thick middle masses can no longer deny. We're all prisoners now.
I gotta think the same thing is happening in Macon, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Lexington, and Cincinnati.