The best, quickest and most sustainable way to reduce the cost of oil would be to overhaul our foreign policy engine, which is the root cause of our economic woes and our other major woes, including our shooting war woes and our poor relationship woes with those countries that have the oil.

Imagine how quickly the price of oil and the gas made from oil would drop if we announced to the world that we were quitting our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our plans for war with Iran, and all other war-like options such as invading Pakistan in pursuit of Al-Qaeda, by changing to a foreign policy of peace now, tomorrow and always, with war no longer honored with a seat at the American table of brotherhood and goodwill among nations.

As for the present energy crisis, running around in a frenzy, slapping away at the air like a person under attack from a swarm of yellow jackets, screaming for an energy policy that attacks immediately in all directions with no time for serious thought or consideration based on merit, just so it’s a direction, is not going to cut it, neither in the short term or the long term.

What we really need, instead of politics and phony patriotism, is a little bit of thought. Granted, it’s a little hard to focus very much thinking on anything when one is undergoing an attack by a swarm of bees, but if one is really to gain anything from the experience, one must screw their courage to the sticking place, slow down their heart rate and force themselves to think, even as they are getting stung, if they are to escape the damnation of going through it time and again.

It is quite honestly foolish for America to harbor the delusion that it can ever be independent from foreign oil when it only has about 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves under its soil, including what’s under the ocean, and uses about a quarter of the world’s oil which is pretty much produced by only about a half-dozen of the world’s oil producing nations.

Certainly there are some things that America could do to keep from being completely overwhelmed by its dependency on foreign oil, such as insisting that the automotive industry come up with engines equipped to run on every type of liquid fuel while including also a plug that will allow them to run on electric energy.

While that wouldn’t hurt anything, there are some options such as nuclear energy that includes waste that remains dangerous for thousands of years, and which would never have any chance at all of reducing the cost of gas at the pumps anyway, which should not be thrown out on the table as a legitimate response to the sudden energy crisis that has been creeping up on us for the past half-century.

Mother Nature or God or luck of the draw has caused most of the world’s oil reserves to be under the ground of those nations, represented mostly by OPEC, that have it under their ground. They have the right to make the price and control the price as much as they are able to do for their best interests and benefit, because it is their oil.

After that, it is up to the speculators and others who believe they have a hand on the pulse of both the consumers and suppliers in such a way as to be able to jack up the price that best suits their purposes as honest capitalists just trying to make a buck in the marketplace. The same goes for the rest that make their living by gambling on the sure bets that is the business of the stock markets.

Certainly it is ironic that free enterprise and capitalism seem suddenly to have backed up on themselves in the worldwide oil market, creating a sort of nasty sludge not fit to be lived in by man or beast. But only ironic in the sense that greed has always been championed as the key ingredient of conservative economic theory. Were the truth really known, greed would not be considered the great cure-all that it’s been made out to be.

In this same vein, it has been greed — along with all its cousins, such as arrogance, hypocrisy, old-fashioned stupidity, phony patriotism, gang politics, delusions of standing at the foot of the cross and being loved by Jesus above all other nations, as well as all manner of other insane and sundry notions that have allowed us to think that Americans were pre-ordained by God to win the great Super Bowl of life on the planet Earth, with the right to destroy any nation in its path — that has put us in the energy crisis that we face today.

Notice how the politicians, speaking as our mouthpieces, refer to most of the oil-bearing nations as our enemies, which we should no longer be obliged to for our oil. That’s just gang politics, playing to the phony, hypocritical ear of a greedy, self-righteous American public that doesn’t have enough sense to realize that those nations have the oil whether we like it or not, and that we never did have any legitimate right to invade their countries and use every means possible to route their oil to us.

You want to tap into some good oil and gas prices that you can actually live with until you can find other ways to fuel your cars, trucks, ships, trains and airplanes? Try a little friendship instead of the hard hand of pressure, punishment, violence and war; or else you are going to go the way of the dinosaur, America.

Naman Crowe, a Vietnam veteran, began his award-winning journalism career in 1971. He has written for numerous publications. He can be reached at namancrowe@yahoo.com.