A Letter from Scotland to Americans

Sorry, USA, but I’m going to have to rant my ass off at you (not anyone I know personally, but just in general).

There’s a lunatic in the Kremlin threatening a possible global thermonuclear war and yet 95 percent of posts from the USA today are bitching about the price of gasoline.  Would it be too much to ask of you to look beyond the end of your own street for five minutes and acquire even a minuscule sense of perspective?

I’ve had my calculator out, and you don’t know when you’re well off.  The average U.S. gasoline price today is $4.06 per gallon.  Boo frickin’ hoo.  What a hell of a lot of you don’t realize is that $4.06 per gallon is substantially less than almost every country in the world is paying for gasoline/petrol BEFORE Putin invaded Ukraine.  U.S. gasoline is dirt cheap because you pay virtually no tax on it.  The same gallon of gasoline would cost you $8.69 at a petrol station in Scotland, today, but we’re not moaning about it because we kinda’ figure that the survival of global democracy is slightly more important right now.  By the way, buckle up, bitches, because you’re going to be seeing prices like that (and worse) before we’re anywhere near the end of this little excursion to the foothills of World War III.

And another thing.  It’s not “all Joe Biden’s fault.”  Do you really want to know why even a slight increase in the price of gas has you hurting so badly?  Maybe it might have something to do with the USA having monetized every single activity necessary for human survival short of breathing, and I’m sure at least one corporate laboratory has been working on a way to make that happen for years.  If you weren’t screwed to the wall on a daily basis by a combination of peasant wages and rampant consumer greed, you might have the necessary financial resources to absorb sudden monetary shocks like this.  But 42 years of unrestrained capitalism has strip-mined every last cent from the US working class and handed it to billionaires.

To make matters worse, your refusal to pay taxes in order to invest in services like public transportation, universal health care, and a workable welfare system means that even the slightest increase in prices creates an unsurvivable financial crisis for those least able to afford it.  Maybe if you hadn’t spent half a century or more believing that paying taxes for public infrastructure is “socialism,” you wouldn’t be hurting so badly when a gallon of gas goes up by a buck twenty.

I’m sorry, USA. I love you dearly — but you have to stop watching Tucker Carlson and believing fake memes on your social media scroll.  Pull your heads out of your collective asses and look at the bigger picture, for once.

Sorry. / Not sorry.