Pray-in to solve gasoline prices?

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars wrote a blurb about this amazing story of illogic running (near) rampant in San Francisco:

Pray-in at S.F. gas station asks God to lower prices

Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.

Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.

Yes, it's come to that.

"God is the only one we can turn to at this point," said Twyman, 59. "Our leaders don't seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring.

Ummm... What? Come again?

"Our leaders" (well, our CiC and his [Good 'ole Boy] Party) seem unwilling to do anything about it. The President doesn't want to take action, his appointee in the EPA is dragging his agency's feet on monitoring CO2 as a pollutant, and the administration doesn't want to allow California (and 17 other states) to strengthen Clean Air Act requirements (which CA is allowed to do under the CAA). All of this, even though the Supreme Court made a decision last year that CO2 was not exempt from pollution monitoring.

Okay, so this isn't only about climate change/global warming. This is a discussion about the price of gasoline, and it's recent meteoric rise (see left). However, if Twyman wanted to make some real impact, maybe he should talk with Gordon Brown to have him work more closely with the strikers at Grangemouth. I mean, now that they are striking, the price of gas has increased past £5 per gallon (roughly $10/gallon)! If there isn't a strong argument for a cause-and-effect relationship between a human action (union strike) and the price of a human-manufactured commodity (petroleum), I don't know what is.

Of course, Twyman could have exhorted activists to talk with Chevron - make the oil company responsible for human life (something that Xtians always seem to point to in their vaunted morals) caused by extraction. If Chevron (and other oil/gas companies) didn't pay so much for their lawyers and public relations firms, possibly the price of gas might be a little less. And if not, then it would at least be easier to bend over and take it at the pump, knowing that - at least - the company reaming us (thanks to a myopic, all-eggs-in-one-basket method of automotive technology development and synergistic urban planning trajectory over the past several decades) is socially aware, and not merely spreading poverty and multi-generational toxic health hazards to poor parts of the world for the benefit of our modality of life. (I'm sorry, am I coming across a little strong there?)

But this isn't a single-sector, single-nation issue, right? Maybe the whole thing is too big for one person to do anything about. Well, instead of praying that gasoline prices drop, Twyman could pray that people change their actions to bring about a change in the gasoline price. Or Twyman could tell people petition their government (a very constitutional thing to do) to provide incentives for people to purchase urban-friendly electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles; cities to increase the number of bicycle-friendly bike lanes and bike parking; invest in public transportation; etc. In other words, provide real alternative options for people to solve their transportation problems. Gasoline prices might well be less of an issue once the need for it is diminished.

Ahcuah (one of the commenters of Ed's post) made the comparison between Twyman's call-to-prayer with Georgia's Gov. Sonny Perdue's call-to-prayer for rain (much more of a traditional reason to pray - harkening back to times when people beseeched a divine Otherness (deity, nature spirit, ancestors, etc.) to provide something over which the supplicant had no control). The governor's prayer for rain seems to have had rather ... 'parched' results (see right). Although I can see the comparison between the two, I don't think it really is an apples-to-apples comparison. Gov. Perdue's prayer is for something outside the 'human-realm'; over which we have little actual control. On the other hand, Twyman's is for something that is entirely in the 'human-realm' of possible action. Twyman's actions are akin to praying for lower medical costs (a 'human-realm' issue) because our government leaders can't reach a compromise on how to tackle the problem of national health insurance (something that will have an effect on the 'human-realm' of issues).

Of course, people are allowed to pray for anything they want (far be it for me to dictate what people should and shouldn't pray for), and prayers for world peace are made every day. However, prayer by itself is not as effective as prayer followed by constructive action. It's for this last reason (the disconnect between what we may wish - and therefore pray - and those things that we can actually act on - and maybe pray for the conviction or endurance to pursue) that I'm most peeved with this story.

Final thought: maybe this was prayer motivated by feelings of frustration with the government. Maybe this is equivalent to the "clinging to guns and religion" we heard so much negative press about. If this is the case, then perhaps Obama had it right, after all. (I'm convinced he did, but that's just one small voice, and what does one small voice know about anything?)