One major oil company reported late week more than $1 billion in sales in one day. Did you read that? More than $1 billion in sales in one day. Another one reported record profits. Of course, this news should not surprise any of us. We’ve become accustomed to hearing about oil company profits and we’ve become even more accustomed to hearing everyone from our next door neighbor to members of Congress complaining about it.

Who has the power to change it? Congress? It’s putting on a good show of investigating record profits while American consumers suffer at the pump. My bet is that Congress won’t do a thing. Too much oil company money in its pockets.

Who has the power to change it? The oil companies? Certainly. But in a nation that values capitalism, who can blame them for reaping what our economy allows them to sow? Shareholders benefit because they take the risk of investing. Who’s to blame them for reaping the benefits of their investments?

Who has the power to change it? You and I? Absolutely. But will we put the brakes on driving, except when absolutely necessary, to make that change? Probably not. The automobile has changed the world, as predicted. But our dependence on it has changed our worlds even more than we may want to admit.

Allow me to share two quotes that may give insight as to how drastically the automobile and its need for gasoline have changed the way most Americans, at least by the measure of oil company profits, think.

“Consider the man on horseback, and I have been a man on horseback for most of my life. Well, mostly he is a good man, but there is a change in him as soon as he mounts. Every man on horseback is an arrogant man, however gentle he may be on foot. The man in the automobile is one thousand times as dangerous. I tell you, it will engender absolute selfishness in mankind if the driving of automobiles becomes common. It will breed violence on a scale never seen before. It will mark the end of the family as we know it, the three or four generations living happily in one home. It will destroy the sense of neighborhood and the true sense of Nation. It will create giantized cankers of cities, false opulence of suburbs, ruinized countryside, and unhealthy conglomerations of specialized farming and manufacturing. It will make every man a tyrant,” wrote R.A. Lafferty in the late 1800s.

“I’m not sure ... about automobiles .... With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization — that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men’s souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can’t have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that. ... the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree ... that automobiles ‘had no business to be invented,’” Eugene, from Booth Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons,” 1918.

As long as we pay rising fuel costs, oil companies will continue to record staggering profits. Perhaps we would do well to take to heart the words of Edward Abbey.

“The longest journey begins with a single step, not with a turn of the ignition key.”

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