Damn, It's Cold In the US

We are going through a major gasoline price spike in the US. My parents and brother run gas stations in Wisconsin, so they feel the brunt of customer complaints. In fact, an American man (a WASP) walked into my brother’s store yesterday after he filled up his eight cylinder SUV for ninety dollars. He threw the money (in fives and ones, no less) at my brother and said ‘fuck you, Arabs’ and walked away before my brother could respond. This incident is a small representation of what America is, and I understand that, but it is, I feel, not too far from the truth that lays below niceties in this country.

As I sit in Starbucks on this late sunny August afternoon, the air conditioning is chilling me to the bone. I asked the green clad lady at the counter if we could change the air conditioning temperature. Her reply:
“No, sir, sorry that’s company policy. We keep it at seventy-one degrees.”
Maybe, it’s the fact that I was born in India that may explain why I’m shivering in my black fleece and long pants. Don’t know. But I did have a thought:

Company policy, right? So because it’s colder in the store, Starbucks must be able to sell more coffees or frappuccinos. This might make some sense. But doesn’t running the AC this hard spend a lot of energy (you know that stuff, we as a planet, are trying to conserve). After I packed my stuff up at Starbucks, I started noting the temperature settings around town. I started to notice that most American establishments and homes were set between seventy-seven and seventy-two degrees. Ouch! Our body temperature likes to stay at 98.6 and it is far hotter outside in the summer. These temperature settings must be unnecessarily using up the energy, right?

Maybe it doesn’t matter, though? This brings me back to the gas prices spiking here in the US. First and foremost, gas prices are spiking because of Hurricane Katrina and her devastation in the Gulf of Mexico. The average American, or for that matter, the President of the country likes to think that it has something to do with Middle Easterners (or Arabs, as most brown people are lumped). But it really doesn’t. Principle number one of business: supply and demand. Americans drive everywhere and are gluttonous not only with their fat burgers, but with everything they do, including the use of energy and gas. Even if the price of gas jumped to eight dollars a gallon, most Americans wouldn’t car pool, ride a bike, or even walk to the nearest grocery store (there’s one on every other block). So guess what? Americans would still fill up and just pay more. Would they let go of their SUVs and designer clothes? Or would they change their antisocial habits enough to ride the bus or the train? Would they stop buying their teenagers a car and having an average of 2 cars per household? I highly doubt it.

For some odd reason, Americans seem to think they are entitled to anything they want. In some delusional minds, ‘Americans saved the world during the World Wars’ or we were wronged by those damn Arabs on Sept. 11th. Hell, why don’t we go drop bombs on Iran? Weren’t they also involved in terrorist attacks, just like Iraq? Let’s face the facts American public: for a first world industrialized nation, you have a very sick, weak, and underfunded educational system; you do have a strong and mobile, and very well funded military system; you have extremely gluttonous habits passed down from generation to generation; you are a ludicrously rich country of people who are in debt (both the government and it’s people); and last and most importantly, you have been taught to be “independent” (aka ‘selfish’) by all of your pop heroes (INCLUDING FOX NEWS) and their twisted values and norms. All of this amounts to our current problems in Iraq, Sept. 11th, and economy, including the one that I began with in this article:

A WASP, overweight man dressed in jeans and a shirt that said “Proud to be American”, who was frustrated by his OWN economic disability caused by his large SUV and a natural disaster (which took place in a city which he probably partied in), decided against all RATIONAL thought. He walked into another US citizen’s work place, a BROWN person that worked EIGHTY hours that week on the same cash register to make sure his young family had enough income. And this WASP man, with his delusional inkling that there must be a conspiracy between Iraqis, Osama Bin Landen, and Saudi Arabians (which by the way, our gov. owes some money to) decided to DISRESPECT another citizen, or more importantly, HUMAN. He didn’t do anything violent, just passive-aggressive (like what his government did in other nations, including Iraq twice). He threw his own hard earned money up in the air and decided to curse an ETHNIC slur, which only demonstrated his weak American education, since the man at the counter was from India, the largest DEMOCRACY in the world, not the made up country of “Arabia”.

Good luck to everybody in the ever increasing tension of energy conservation and human dignity, oh yeah, and GOD BLESS or BISM ALLAH, RAKHMAN, RAHIM. Welcome to the U.S.