Out of gas?

Man, am I glad I got rid of my car last year.

Now, I remember this from my childhood:

I remember sitting in my dad's Ford Fairlane waiting in a long line for gas, something I'm sure many Xers recall from their formative years. Though you might have thought that that politically motivated oil crisis, more than 20 years ago now, might have been the wakeup call America needed to begin a shift away from aggressive consumption of oil -- it was, in fact, fairly quickly forgotten. And for every indication that some folks are taking the current runup in gas prices as a wakeup call -- like the fact that hybrid cars are so hot -- there's a counterindication that suggests that lots of people are still asleep: like the comeback of gas-guzzling muscle cars, which were killed off their first time out by the 1973 oil shock. (These new muscle cars get around 16 miles to the gallon in city driving; a Hummer, by comparison, isn't that much worse, at around 13. A Prius? Somewhere in the range of 50 to 60.)

Perhaps the great thing Generation X will be called upon to do -- in the same way that the Lost Generation, our generational counterparts during the last great crisis, were the generals who won World War II -- is to lead a crash program in retooling our society away from its unsustainable thirst for oil. Maybe we'll build continent-spanning bullet trains run by nuclear power. Maybe we'll build walkable cities and towns. Maybe our Manhattan Project will learn the secrets of cheap, clean nuclear fusion. Maybe we'll do all three, and more.

Fasten your seatbelts and put your thinking cap on. It's gonna be a bumpy life...