From your post, I'm fairly confident that you are young enough to not have visceral memories of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis http://en.

From your post, I'm fairly confident that you are young enough to not have visceral memories of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis . Look at the picture of that line for gas on that web page. I can assure you that that was not an anomaly. It looked like that all over the country. There were probably cars in that gas line which did not fit into the picture. Those cars I'm sure were moving very slowly. At some point the gas station would run out of gas. Then cars would race to the next gas station. Americans are used to turning on the water faucet, and always having warm, clean water come out of it. They are used to flipping a light on, and if the switch is not flipped again, that bulb burning for weeks on end until it burns out. Once you travel outside the US, especially if it is not somewhere like western Europe or Japan, you begin to see that this is not the case in much of the world. And I'm not talking about the poorest slum in Bangladesh or deep in the Amazon, I'm talking in large cities, in locally middle class surroundings in much of the world. It gives one perspective on such things. Warm, clean water does not consistently pour out of faucets by magic, it requires an infrastructure which a great deal of the world does not have. In the same manner, political troubles, wars, natural disasters and the like have a way of stopping oil shipments. It is not until this stops unexpectedly that most people realize the fragility of such things.