As part of my job I have to read and deal with the messages that are sent in from our supporters in response to blast e-mails we send them about issues, activism opportunities, or pleas for their money. Before the election, back when gas was topping $4.35 a gallon, we sent one about off shore drilling and why it’s bad. Naturally, we got a lot of vitrolic responses back from people who are tired of paying out the proverbial for gas, and people who just generally have their heads up their asses.
One thing that stuck out for me, though, was this particularly well reasoned response. The typos are all from the original; the commentary is all mine:
You idiots, we can no longer afford for those greedy middle easterners to take a shit on solid gold toilets!
As a Floridian I am all for drilling in the gulf, in Alaska and anywhere we have oil reserves.
What you should be fighting for are cars with high gas mpg ratings to be affordable to those who can least afford them.
Funny, our supporters in Michigan tell us that higher fuel efficiency would kill what is left of the American auto industry. Perhaps you should duke it out.
People like me who has only a 1998 Ford F-150 pick up that gets 12 mpg but can’t afford a $35,000 for a car that gets 30 mpg.
Right now people are loosing their homes and jobs as a direct result of the high price of oil and YOU WANT TO MAKE IT EVEN MORE EXPENSIVE!!!!
No, people are losing their homes because they don’t live small enough to deal with changes in market prices over which they have no damn control. Because yeah, a $2,000 flat screen HD TV is a “necessity.”
The biggest problem with you “Young and inexperienced” tree huggers is you can’t see the forest for the tree your hugging!
You weren’t born back when we had gas rations back in the 1970’s as you tool around in the brand new economy car your rich daddy’s bought you.
Um…the average age at this organization is 45. Our CEO is pushing 55, and I personally remember waiting in gas rationing lines both on the East and West Coasts of this country. And I paid off my 60 month car loan in 37 months by not buying lunch out for nearly three years so where is my rich daddy again?
I am 50 years old and have lost almost everything. I can barely afford to feed my family, why? HIGH GAS PRICES!!!!!
This country is in a recession, not because of the Bush administration but because of your hero the Clintons. Changes take a while before there felt and the Clintons had a better economy because of Regan’s economics and the internet explosion of the 1980’s.
Oh, you mean the economics that brought us a recession in 1982 and a recession in 1987? Given that the first dial-up ISP opened in the U.S. in 1989 and the first web browser wasn’t developed until 1993 I’d hardly call the internet explosion a feature of the 1980s. Perhaps you mean the 1990s?
Your boy’s and girl’s; the dummycrates have had control of the congress and senate for how long now(?) and both alone has more power then the president, are things better now?
That would be less than 24 months when you wrote this but I’d hardly call 51 seats in the Senate and 234 in the House controlling the legislature.
I’m certain I won’t receive a response to this email as your blinders and ear plugs will send it right into the delete folder because you have all been brain washed.
No, you won’t receive a response because I have real work to do and you are totally certain you are correct so why should I waste my precious time trying to convince you otherwise?
You may not know it but you and those like you are pushing America into a socialist state. Take that from someone who was born by parents who lived through the Great Depression, someone who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the Cold War.
When you have that under your belt you might see things a little differently.
I’m a tweener child of a pre-WWII baby. I have been in the wrong place at the wrong time my entire life: AIDS hit before I got to take advantage of the sexual revolution; the recession left us by the Keating Five scandal (hum..unregulated financial markets and banks investing in the most risky manner possible cause a deep recession…does any of that sound familiar?) in the early ’90s pretty much shoved me and most of my generation right into grad school because there were no jobs; by the time I did get a job I was making a pittance which means I didn’t get to ride the dot com boom and get any profit out of that and now I’m hitting middle age just as we’re reaping the fruits of the neo-cons’ greed and deregulation. No, I have no idea what hardship might be like. And WTF does the Cold War have to do with the price of gas, exactly?
You know what a Republican is? A Democrat that grew up!
Gee, I always thought a Republican was a Democrat that had been mugged…but I digress. Let me quote your most famously regarded Republican hero to ask are you better off than you were four years ago? How about eight? Yeah, I thought so. Please engage brain before hitting send next time, and thank you so much for your feedback.
What scares me is that this guy probably votes. What scares me even more is that for the next few decades Florida is still poised to be a swing state in national elections.
I like your comments here :). And I totally hear you on being in the wrong place at the wrong time (though my parents were post WWII babies). We Gen Xers weren’t really slackers, we just couldn’t quite get our feet under us for a while with events converging as they did and competing for jobs with the youngest of the baby boom set ;).
I feel this man’s pain, I really do. But no one forced him to buy a low mpg pickup in the first place (certainly, there were affordable and more fuel efficient vehicles around in ’98). Cheap gas is not a birth right, oil is a finite resource, and the solution isn’t to further wreck the environment just to save a buck today. The toll high gas prices take is very real. But most people also have choices about how much driving they do, apart from getting themselves to and from work.
And how, exactly, is opposing off-shore drilling pushing America into socialism? I’d really like it if someone could explain that to me…