THE ICEMAN WENTITH

So anyway I'm leaving for work and my personal communicator tells me that the airways are clogged this morning, that perhaps I should consider taking the personal flypak. It's such a nice day in the city dome that I decide buzzing all the artificial trees would be a nice way to get to my job of controlling robo-monkeys. Of course these two hour work days and two day work weeks are very exhausting so I may need my flying car later for a quick trip to the holographic center for a little r & r in 17th century Hawaii.
Then I wake up. I drag my ass to my 1989 Jeep, putt-putt to the gas station so I can pay 3 bucks a gallon for gas, so I can then get on the freeway with a million other morons and sit and stare straight ahead waiting for someone to move so I can get to my low paying 50 hour a week job. The heat, the smog, the lies.
I as well as many others my age were lied to. We grew up in the sixties and seventies with the promise of better things in the future. And I don't mean being able to cook TV dinners in two minutes. I mean longer life and less work. More leisure and less crime. We wouldn't need money and peace would reign over all the world. True now I can play solitaire on my computer instead of with a deck of cards but is that a fair trade off for not having a real flying car? Call me crazy but I don't think so. In fact now that I think about it I kinda miss playing solitaire with cards.
Instead we get in our gas powered cars just like our fathers and their fathers and their fathers did. We may have a few more buttons in those cars but they're basically the same. Oh don't get me wrong some things have changed. Like price. The first time I filled up my mom's Ford Pinto gas was .35 cents a gallon. Five bucks would last you a whole week. Now five dollars barely fills up your lawn mower. And what's the big deal about these hybrid cars. Sure they get 35 miles to the gallon. But you have to pay big bucks to save that money. The big new idea is that they are half gas engine and half battery powered. Wow a car that runs on batteries never heard of that idea before. I remember a car many many years ago called a Dodge Colt. If I remember right it used to get 42 miles per gallon. And it was cheap. Wait for a few years when these battery engines start to go out and see how much it'll cost to put new ones in them. It won't be cheap. A personal jet pack may be cheaper.
Meanwhile oil companies sit in big ivory towers counting their billions in profit that they make each quarter. I'm sure they would be very happy if we went another hundred years with no big changes. I hate to say it but I kinda think the world would be a much safer place if not for oil. If we weren't so depended on it most of the middle east would be as important to us as a pile of sand.
I know there has been new energy technology that has come up that needed money for research. Some of these technologies were bought up by petroleum companies where they lay buried in big R&D departments maybe never to be heard from again. You can see them stacked up next to the red cars of Los Angeles the city that once had the most advance public transit system in the world. The oil companies helped us with that one too. The theory was they wouldn't be necessary with such a cheap energy source as oil being av able.
All I can say is that I'm just one little guy that feels cheated out of my future. It makes sense that the more money you have and get the more powerful you become. The more powerful you become the more you want to make sure nothing threatens to change that. I'm just saying.
Sometimes it's hard for us as a people to move on. To change the status quo and jump into the future. We didn't always feel this way. Can you image if the ice companies of the 1920's were as powerful as the oil companies. Right now I would be sitting on my porch waiting for the ice man to make his delivery before my frozen pizza thawed.