Oil apocalypse and make-believe

Not long ago, someone on the street handed me another flier warning me about the impending oil crash. To some IU students, this seems to be a major fear. They seem to think that one day the supply of oil will simply disappear and society will be left at a standstill. \nThat this fear is unfounded should be apparent to anyone with a pinch of common sense and three credits of an economics class. Once things become more scarce, they become more expensive. The gradual nature of the change in price will create an incentive for developers of alternative fuels while slowly weaning people off oil. It’s something to keep your eye on, surely, but it’s not proper justification for trading your car for bottled water. \nHowever, this doesn’t seem to affect the Peak Oil Movement preachers. They keep handing out their fliers and amassing freeze-dried beans. It’s much the same as when you tell a 5-year-old that the cardboard box he’s playing with is not actually a spaceship – he invents some reason that he shouldn’t listen and then continues his game of pretend. \nOur fantasies have become more elaborate, but at the cost of our reason. You can’t help but see these people and think they’re secretly praying for something – anything – to level civilization. With their voices full of suppressed glee, they tell stories about how everything will be different: long hair, free love and massive agrarian societies that vaguely resemble Northern California.\nLife, it seems, has failed to unfold in accordance with our \nfondest wishes.\nTo be fair, the Peak Oil Movement is currently our best hope for an apocalypse within our time. And when you pick apart this tendency toward doom-saying, what you get is a bunch of people who can’t imagine a world that could continue without them. Every generation secretly hopes that it is the last, that its brief flicker of existence will be magnified by its place in history. We hope to live in exciting, meaningful times. What’s more meaningful than the end of the world? \nWhen Y2K was “imminent,” I saw a show about people who traded their luxuries for survival goods and moved to the desert. They were sure, like so many people before them, that the end was at hand. But I lament to suggest that their reassurance at seeing the world still intact on Jan. 2 was dampened by their realization that they had to go back to work. Playtime was over, and there were still bills to pay and lawns to mow. Because even if it isn’t always exciting and suspenseful, life is unavoidable. \nWe’re still left with the question of how, then, to create significance, but that’s a question for psychologists and philosophers. Either way, please don’t preach doom when it isn’t going to come. There are genocides and repressions and injustices out there, and the activism arena doesn’t have any more room to spare for self-delusion.