Waterworld

Remember Ross Perot? The diminuitive billionaire from Texarkana? He ran for president twice. Once in 1992. Once in 1996. Bill Clinton should thank Perot for helping his campaign. Perot became the embodiment of citizens fed up with George Bush, but who weren't ready to vote Democrat. They wanted less of the same old thing. Then, people realized Perot was nuts, and there went the opportunity to through the election to the House of Representatives. Perot was polling at about a third of the eligible voters, which is as good as anyone has ever done since the system went to the two-party system.

Perot had one intriguing idea. He wanted to tax gas heavily. Fifty cent tax. Dollar tax. Raise gas prices to $1.50 or *gasp* $2 a gallon. That's what his economic advisor were telling him. Of all the ideas, this was probably the one that the average Joe would have objected to.

And yet, those prices would seem rather quaint now. Throughout Bush's presidency, gas prices climbed to $2 a gallon, and today, they are reaching $3 a gallon. As Americans, we're coddled on cheap gas prices. From 1980 to 2000, gas cost maybe $1 a gallon. It didn't change prices for nearly twenty years.

Meanwhile, Europeans routinely priced gas in the $3 range per gallon, and we laughed at them and their tiny cars and tiny roads. Now who's laughing? SUV owners are looking at $90 to pump up their twenty gallon vehicles once a week.

But why have prices risen? What is going on? What's different now than even two years ago? The recent jump has been blamed on Hurricane Katrina. People now make claims of price gouging, the act of raising prices to make more money, even when there may be little reason to do so, and blaming it on something.

There's nothing like natural disaster to bring out the best and worst of us. For everyone who's willing to give time, money, prayers, and support to those in greatest need, there's another who's looking to make a buck. When the tsunami hit southeast Asia and India, there were phishing scams meant to lift money from those seeking their best selves and put it in the pockets of those representing their worst selves.

There are reports of looting throughout hurricane affected regions. Major disasters seem to do that. When the US first took over Iraq, looters stole art from museums. When there was a huge blackout in NYC in the mid 70s, there was looting.

Disasters make us question what appropriate behavior should be. For example, should the New Orleans Saints play football? There are those who say that we shouldn't be thinking of sports when people have lost homes, lives, and, at least, for the short term, their futures.

Yet, the areas affected are some of the most economically depressed in the country. Many residents are far from wealthy. While flooding certainly made situations worse, it's not as if things were rosy to begin with. Distractions such as football make people forget about their day to day woes.

And that, perhaps, is the real tragedy. It takes a disaster to make the country realize that these people need help. Not the kind of help that helps them recover from flooded homes, but the long term recovery of this region. It's been said that the South never really recovered when Sherman made his (in)famous march to the sea, burning everything in his path.

The South had been built on an agrarian society, which is always prone to weather and boll weevils. The North went industrial, and this never quite made it to the south. Furthemore, education is bad, and the respect for education even worse.

If Katrina reminds of anything, it's that there was a disaster before the disaster.