When Trump declared the US had started bombing Iran, my first thought was: WWIII. My second was superficial and selfish: I better fill up my gas tank.
Just before the war started, I had been doing a lot of driving. To Richmond Hill. Even up to Huntsville. I started noticing gas prices along the way. Around our neighbourhood they were about $1.35 a litre. Sometimes a dime less in other parts of the GTA.
Then the bombing started. Prices at the corner gas station began to climb.
Tuesday morning the sign read $1.41.9.
Wednesday it was $1.43.
Thursday $1.46.
The numbers were rising faster than the war reports.
If the war was going as well as Trump was saying, why were gas prices climbing so quickly?
The sign on the corner was sending one message in big red numbers. But watching the CBC and their coverage — people celebrating in Richmond Hill, Prime Minister Mark Carney declaring support for the war — everything seemed fine.
So now there were two competing messages in my mind.
What the media was saying and showing me.
And what gas prices were saying and showing me.
Both were immediate.
But one of them was urgent.
If I don’t pay for fuel, we stop moving.
If I don’t pay for food, my family doesn’t eat.
And as everyone knows, when fuel prices go up, food prices go up with them.
At No Frills, almost nothing on my bill was under five dollars. At Nations it wasn’t much better. A single tomato was a dollar. A small package of meat slices was $15.
If prices are already this high, how are we going to afford fuel and groceries in a few weeks?
People are already stealing food from No Frills. “We’ve caught hundreds of people,” one employee told me. And that was back at the start of the winter.
I began looking for reassurance that the war would be over quickly. Newscasts from the Middle East. Professors. Experts. U.S. and British military analysts explaining strategy on television. No one said that.
The images coming out of the Middle East are horrible. Death and despair. Refineries on fire.
And the war has just started.
Back in the neighbourhood, the price sign at Oakwood and Vaughan kept climbing.
By Sunday morning it read $1.57.9. The tank I filled on Sunday might be one of my last for a while.
