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Is it over?
The question seems unavoidable as you top off the tank and the pump readout, in a moment you surely shall remember well into old age, enters triple-digit territory for the first time in your life.
Have we lost the ability to escape?
You can’t help but ask it when you juggle the pieces of your life in an ongoing math computation. The balls in the air: Your stagnant or declining income. The cost of getting to that favorite getaway that lays five hours away, on the coast, near that lake, below that mountain — places, you like to think, that define who you are. And the many increasing costs of living. (Suddenly, no longer defined as the trappings of living, like the size of justifiably affordable memory on one’s iPod, but the cost of basic living: sustenance, shelter, security.)
Dizzy, you squeeze your eyes shut, all the balls bounce on the ground, and you go back to the Jumbleword and leave it for another day.
Are we now stuck in place?
For a society raised on the notion that mobility is to freedom what liquidity is to water, it’s the worst nightmare come true. It’s tempting to add the adjective “unexpected” to any reference of said nightmare, but we’d be kidding ourselves. Did anyone really think the free ride of cheap oil would endure forever?
Well, no. But raise your hand — and be honest — if you thought, selfishly, privately, in the deepest recesses of the me-first cortex of the brain, that the ability to get where you want, when you want, without serious sacrifice would hold out at least until after you personally had slipped the surly bonds of Earth and moved on.
Does that mean — honestly, does it mean — that the best times are all behind us?

seattletimes.nwsource.com