Some weeks ago, I arranged to meet a friend at the gas station at the Grand River exit off I-96, just north of Brighton. As I waited, I watched the traffic go by: SUVs, big pickups, RVs. Every one of them happily guzzling gas on a warm spring afternoon.
And I thought to myself: I’m watching the end of an era.
That's because we are at the end of cheap gas (relatively speaking) and the life style it made possible during the last century.
Cheap petroleum has produced "exurban" communities like Brighton and Howell, where people drive 30, 40, or more miles each way to their jobs and think nothing of driving 20 miles to Wal-Mart to shop on the weekends. It is a lifestyle that has produced enormous, elaborate new high schools. Think Northville, South Lyon, Walled Lake, with vast parking lots for the convenience of students – students, mind you! – driving back and forth to school.
The bulldozers that produced all of this, the endless scrapings of the ground in outer ring suburban communities for new subdivisions, new shopping malls, new schools, new roads, were made possible by one thing: Gasoline that sold for under $2.00 a gallon less than ten years ago, but which today is marching past $4.19 even at the cheapest stations.
We've built a lifestyle on cheap fuel, combined with low-interest rates and an expectation of ever-increasing home values that provided us with an ever-increasing home equity loan line of credit.
And now that the world is changing, it is time to look back and assess what was happening, and who we have been.
The era we are watching end involved an entire interconnected set of things that, taken together, have pretty much defined the American way of life ever since the end of World War II.
Jobs, for the most part, have been plentiful in Michigan. And if you were lucky to catch on with the auto industry and happened to be a United Auto Workers union member, you got a big paycheck and gold-plated benefits. And with solid job security and a good pension, you could get that cabin up north, the boat, an all-terrain-vehicle, all the toys. That's suddenly no longer true.
As a result of the rise of industrial farming and federal government subsidies for beef and corn and rice, food was pretty cheap. Sure, fast food was fattening and not very good for you, but you could feed a family on your weekly paycheck and have something left over for fun. Anybody who's been at the supermarket lately knows that's changed drastically, too.
For most of that time, people also felt, all things considered, that things were pretty good, that the country was generally on the right track, and that things would gradually get better and better for Michigan families, and that the kids would live better lives still. America was the most powerful nation on earth and, at the same time, the moral beacon of hope to do the right thing, to be the shining city on the hill. The government that kept our Social Security checks coming was reasonably effective, and the social and political institutions that knitted our country together worked fairly well.
Then, however, came September 11, followed by Iraq. And Hurricane Katrina, followed by more Iraq. Then came a melted-down mortgage system and an over-extended and ethically challenged financial industry. Michigan was additionally shackled with a fiercely partisan political system that failed to get the important things done.
Now, the signs are all around us that our long era of good times will never again be what it was. All manner of things are starting to go wrong, or at least fraying at the edges. My gut tells me they're interconnected in a complex and subtle pattern.
Americans have, of course, seen massive transformations before. Starting in 1775, our revolution brought us independence from colonial England and ushered in a great and successful experiment in creating an entirely new system of self-government.
The Civil War confirmed that America was in fact destined to be primarily an industrial economy, not an agricultural one, and that this required a strong national government.
Finally, the frightening Great Depression sowed the seeds of a national safety net and the notion that our society, acting through our government, has some responsibility for each and every one of us.
Craig Ruff of Public Sector Consultants in Lansing is a deeply thoughtful man who knows something about almost everything. In a recent column, he suggested our nation is on the eve of a "great transformation." Echoing the argument of William Strauss and Neil Howe in their influential book "The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy," Ruff noted that these fundamental transformations take place every 70 years or so. Given that the modern era started in 1945, we are about due.
The philosopher George Santayana once observed that "those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Nobody knows what future historians will conclude about these turbulent and contentious times. But it is getting clearer and clearer that rough waters are ahead, and we’re going to need every bit of our historical memory and common sense to get through what's coming.
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Editor’s Note: Former newspaper publisher and University of Michigan Regent Phil Power is a longtime observer of Michigan politics and economics, and a former chairman of the Michigan chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He is also the founder and president of The Center for Michigan, a centrist think-and-do tank which publishes the Michigan Scorecard. The opinions expressed here are Power’s own and do not represent the official views of The Center. He welcomes your comments at ppower@thecenterformichigan.net.
