By Warren Brown
Sunday, June 29, 2008

History frames perception. Consider my recent conversation with friends who see in the current fuel crisis a chance to "go local," to return to an era where communities produced what they consumed, where trucking goods from one place to another was unnecessary, where we could walk to where we wanted to go.

There is apparent logic to their argument. As pointed out by Lou Ann Hammond, a California freelance writer who covers the energy industry, almost everything we own "has been in a truck at one point or another."

That was okay last year when diesel sold for $2.79 a gallon. But the price has risen to $4.69 a gallon. Suddenly, trucking everything hither and yon does not seem like such a smart idea.

Hammond put it this way: "Imagine spending $2.79 to go five miles one year and then having to spend $1.90 more, an increase of 68 percent, to go the same five miles next year."

Hmmm. That could cramp your style. It could make you want to go local.

My friends who are eager to go that route are white and liberal. I am black and, at least by their political meter, conservative.

I point this out because perception is affected by many things. In the United States, like it or not, the history of the color line is one of them.

My "go local" buddies mostly are in their 30s and early 40s. Only two of them ever lived on a farm. One hails from a Florida working-class background. The remaining few of them are trust-fund babies.

What they have in common in addition to their yearning for a communal return to the land is a general dislike of things automotive. I often joke that I am a member of their circle because of affirmative action: They need a car guy.

But, despite the seeming common sense of their enthusiastic "go local" advocacy, I found myself disagreeing with them and then marveling over their baggage-free innocence. There is idyllic wonderment in their desire to go local. There is a yearning for an America that, viewed from the prisms of my personal and ethnic histories, never existed.

I grew up loving cars and trucks because I absolutely hated being local. Farms, to me, represented bondage more than freedom. The good life always existed elsewhere -- out there, somewhere on the open road. I yearned to get away from New Orleans, from Louisiana, from the Deep South. I wanted to stay away from anything that looked like a farm, a self-contained community where everybody knew everybody else's business and where all too many people thought they knew my place.

Give me a car, please! Fill the tank, regardless of the cost. (That was easy to do in my earlier days of passionate wanderlust because gasoline was so cheap.) I lived and breathed Jack Kerouac. Did I love the road? Yeah, baby! God's child wanted to be free!

I now realize the silly romanticism of my own faded notions. There is no free lunch, no cost-free expenditure or production of energy, no constant movement without somehow producing waste matter somewhere.

We all pay, one way or another. The environment pays. We'll pay for that nearly two-dollar increase in the cost of diesel fuel. There is no way that trucking companies will carry that heavy burden alone. I know that.

Still, I shudder at the idea of an America that has turned inward because it can no longer afford the fuel to keep trucking, an America that has become insular because gasoline costs too much to keep moving ahead.

I don't want that kind of America. I am willing to do almost anything to prevent it from occurring. Yes, I know that is the same kind of thinking that factors in our violent involvement in the Middle East. So, perhaps mine is another kind of naive thinking.

I am willing to do anything short of war, including more drilling along the continental shelf and in Alaska. You see what happens when I become hysterical about the possibility of a more insular America? I start channeling Vice President Cheney and the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

I can't help it. It's a disease. There's just no way that I can accept an America bound by diminished personal and commercial transportation options. My America has to keep moving. Start drilling!