Voices: Food for thought

June 05, 2007 10:16 pm

— Everywhere I go, I hear people complaining about the price of gas. I also would like for the price to go down, but is it too high?
Get a load of this. As of today here in Carthage:
Gasoline, $3.29 per gallon; Coca-Cola by the can, $10.88 per gallon; coffee by the cup in a local restaurant, $12.80 per gallon; Stetson men’s cologne, $853 per gallon; Estee Lauder perfume, $4,480 per gallon; Azopt eyedrops, $29,250 per gallon; Travatan eyedrops, $108,000 per gallon.
Pity me, I use both of these eyedrops.
Let’s be thankful that our automobiles aren’t powered by Travatan. If they were, it would cost me $162,000 just to drive to church in Joplin each Sunday. A trip to Washington, D.C., and back would cost $10,368,000 and a trip to California to visit my grandchildren would cost me $13,824,000.
So let’s be thankful. Go ahead and buy what gas we need. Forget all those other items we can do without and give our surplus money to charity.
By the way, when I was a young man back in the 1930s, gasoline was 10 cents per gallon. I worked hard at a grain elevator for 20 cents per hour. How many people now work an hour for two gallons of gas? Very few.
Ralph McConnell
Carthage