What do you think about when you fill up your gas tank? | In Focus

Published 11:00 am Thursday, June 11, 2026

Have you ever stopped to connect what’s happening across the nation or the world to your own life?

Seeing the connections has been quite easy recently. The price of gasoline has increased dramatically because of President Trump and Israel deciding unilaterally to attack Iran without consulting Congress. The distance between Iran and the U.S. is approximately 6,680 miles.

It’s ironic that the U.S. produces more petroleum than anywhere else in the world, including the Middle East. We produce 13 million barrels of crude oil per day which is about 20% of all the petroleum pumped in the world. We extract 118.5 billion cubic feet of dry natural gas per day, which makes us the world’s largest supplier. We also produce massive amounts of fertilizer, but still need to import certain nutrients.

So, why are prices going up when we have so much abundance that we export to the rest of the world?

There are three reasons: First, world prices for these products determine the price in the United States. If there is a shortage of any of these products in the Middle East, for instance, producers raise their prices to make as much profit as they can. That’s called capitalism. Profit trumps patriotism. As a result, inflation rises. We pay more.

Secondly, most of the petroleum we produce is “sweet,” meaning it is a light oil. We don’t have enough refineries in the U.S. that can refine our “sweet” oil. Therefore, we export a lot of our oil and import a lot of heavier crude that can be refined by our refineries. Much of Venezuela’s crude is the consistency of peanut butter, for example. Changing the refineries is very expensive. It’s simply cheaper to import the oil from abroad.

A third reason for rising inflation is that once there is a world shortage, diesel prices rise. This increases the cost of truckers shipping food and other products to merchants in the U.S., creating a domino effect with the poorest being hurt the most.

Another example of where what happens elsewhere affects us all is in the recent Supreme Court decision to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The majority SCOTUS argument is that racism is no longer an issue in the United States. But in gutting this law, created after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, SCOTUS caused massive redistricting of voting districts in the former Confederacy. While Washington state has not yet been directly affected by these redistricting decisions, the make-up of Congress will affect us all. Blacks in many southern states will lose the opportunity to elect their own candidates. It seems fairness and equality are no longer the issues; partisan power is the objective. Representative democracy is endangered as a result.

Racism is still an issue in Washington state. I recently heard a story about a black man who lives in the south Puget Sound, but works in Seattle. He was constantly stopped by police because of the color of his skin, at least that is his perception. Now he takes public transport because he is afraid that some cop will shoot him merely because he is Black. This has occurred nationally on several occasions. If you were Black, would you take the risk?

Parents of Black children have to give their sons “the talk” about how to react if the police pull them over. Blacks are arrested and imprisoned at a much greater rate than whites. “Black people are arrested at a rate roughly double their share of the population while white people are arrested at rates lower than their population” (google.com).

I have two adopted Black grandchildren. It matters to me when racism increases in the nation because of the actions and decisions of the President and SCOTUS.

I have been a history teacher for nearly fifty years. History rhymes. Attitudes of those who run the government trickle down to those on the lower end of the economic and racial spectrum. We are in a second Gilded Age where the hyper wealthy control the government. Their attitudes affect all of us. We have also entered Jim Crow 2.0 with SCOTUS’ Louisiana v. Callais decision.

The issues of inflation and race are only two major examples where what happens in the nation and world dramatically affects us all. To be ignorant of this fact means those with less power get hurt the most. If you have been affected by inflation and race, then expect the waves of change to continue unabated along with other issues.