Bags of Gasoline

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Two weeks ago today members of my family and I set out on a road trip from my home in West Plains, Missouri, to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina.   That journey represented the first time that I had been on the road since the pandemic began in early 2020.  Our timing for that adventure appears to have been highly fortuitous.

Interstate 40, the route that we took across Tennessee and into North Carolina, had been closed in eastern Tennessee due to forest fires just before we hit the road, and we went through the affected area not long after it reopened.  And now, mere days later, many of the gas stations  in states where we drove (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia) are either out of gas and closed, or suffering huge lines of frustrated motorists who are waiting impatiently to top off their tanks.

The gas crisis has come about from a computer "hack' of one pipeline company that supplies gas to much of the east coast, an attack that was apparently launched out of Russia and was for the purpose of extorting money from the operators of the pipeline.

Yesterday photos began appearing in the news of people in the gas lines who were doing more than just topping off their tanks.  Some were filling plastic bags with gasoline, and others were filling large plastic packing tubs with gas.  They would then put these oddball - and very dangerous - gas-filled containers into their cars and drive off - no doubt some puffing on their cigarettes as they did so!

All of that, of course, sinks the concept of moronic behaviors to a new low.  Who even knew that it was possible to contain gasoline in large sandwich bags?  Somehow, I assumed that like styrofoam cups, the bags would disintegrate when they came into contact with gas.  But, I store my mower gas in a five-gallon hard plastic container, so I guess the composition of plastic sandwich bags must have similar qualities.

Still, it has to be a messy process, getting the gas into the bags - and then later getting it out of the bags and into the vehicle's tank - and the opportunities for explosive and fiery incidents are almost without measure.  One wag on Twitter described the practice as the latest expression of the Theory of Natural Selection, and another noted that it is this year's MAGA IQ test - and that last year's MAGA IQ test involved injecting bleach.

But regardless of their best efforts to self-annihilate, the human equivalents of cockroaches still somehow seem to persist!