America’s local news channels have been going crazy lately over the price of gas. Most of them have a regular cheapest gas station in town segment or something like that on their website. And there are all kinds of stories out there about long lines at the gas pumps and other trifling inconveniences.

Once again, when something really significant is happening, our media is failing us.

There is an international fuel crisis happening right now. And it has to do with violence in the Middle East, the oil supply, price gouging and fixing, and many other things. Too bad none of that makes it into these stories about what’s happening at the local gas station. Too bad that, when the price of oil per barrel is reported, one is given the impression that the price is either a completely random number that no one understands, or that it is handed down from heaven by the Great Tycoon in the sky and there’s just nothing anyone can do about it. One gets the impression, reading the host of articles on this subject recently, that the international oil industry is a quorum of hapless rubes, just as much the victims of unforeseen circumstances as the rest of us.

And meanwhile the situation is affecting the price of everything from the food we eat to who the police chase after. It is obviously beginning to have a snowball effect that could spiral out of control. (Sorry to mix my metaphors there.)

But, as much as I’d love to be able to solely blame the media, or the oil companies, or Dick Cheney, or the Saudi royal family, these are really only bit players after the fact. Once again the blame for our troubles must be placed squarely at our own feet.

Remember the 1990s? I do. I went to and graduated from college, I drove across the country from Ohio to Oregon, I got the chicken pox at the age of 22. What a fun time. I also remember, though, the rise of the dreaded SUV. One could not turn around without running into an SUV. One could not turn on the TV without seeing commercials for SUVs over and over. Everyone wanted them, and everyone bought them. It’s as if no one remembered what happened in the 1970s, when everyone bought all those big American cars, and no one remembered the subsequent necessity of the smaller, more efficient cars from Japan and Germany in the 1980s. It’s as if a majority of people were just outright selfish, short-sighted and willfully ignorant.

Fast forward to now, when people are living longer, having just as many or more babies than ever, eating food that requires enormous death and devastation, living in mcmansions, buying SUVs, boats, RVs and trucks, producing enormous amounts of unnecessary plastic and tossing much of it right into the landfill, and driving their cars two blocks down the street instead of walking.

The energy crisis, and its impending offspring, the food crisis, is entirely of our making and our own lifestyle choices. It is entirely because of our reliance upon coal for electricity and cars for transportation while continuing to expand our population and our lifestyle. It is entirely because anyone who has tried to suggest that we ought to do otherwise has, for decades, been culturally branded as a hippie, or a liberal, or a do-gooder, or a tree-hugger, or a terrorist, or a party pooper, and has been mocked, ridiculed and marginalized by all of the good, decent ‘normal’ people among us.

Well, we can no longer afford such mindless, unwavering normalcy. I just wish people would think of that next time they’re at the gas station.