Who’s Counting? Gas Prices, the Stock Market, and Dead Children

Collapsing in panic over the price of gas is a characteristically incoherent American tradition. The highly paid press, political officials, and the same people who ignore as a matter of routine the rising costs of housing, health care, and higher education treat a 25-cent-per-gallon jump in fuel as tantamount to the apocalypse. Meanwhile, something similar to the apocalypse actually threatens livable ecology on Earth (the universe’s only habitable planet for those keeping count), largely due to the extraction of fossil fuels, but biodiversity in a boiling world is hardly relevant. Or, at least, that is what one could discern from watching CNN and MS-Now, formerly MSNBC, both of which keep a running tracker of the average cost of gas, breathlessly announcing a three-cent increase or one cent drop as if they are reporting live from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Evidently, they would consider it impolite to mention that, according to Car and Driver, most of the top 25 selling automobiles in the US are heavy-duty pickup trucks and large SUVS, notoriously unsafe and expensive vehicles that guzzle gasoline with the same speed and appetite of frat boys using beer bongs at a kegger. If Americans were actually concerned about paying for gas, they would drive fuel economy cars.

Of course, any increase in the cost of living hurts the poor, but many impoverished Americans in inner cities use public transportation, and for those who do own their own cars, rent, health insurance, and the financial barriers to college are much graver concerns.

The fixation on fuel going up or down by a couple of quarters per gallon allows Americans to display the narcissism that accompanies geographic and intellectual isolation. Drivers in the US already consume the highest amounts of gasoline, at the cheapest rates, in the developed world. Paying little attention to the devastating environmental effects, the country continues to build more highways, purchase more monstrous vehicles that belch fumes out of the exhaust pipe, and to quote Joni Mitchell, “pave paradise to put up a parking lot.”

Social psychologists and thoughtful economists have posited that the American fixation on the price of gas operates at the subconscious, symbolic, and ultimately, irrational level. Because they see the cost advertised at gas stations at every corner, they become emotionally invested in its fluctuation. It becomes emblematic of the cost of living in such a way that housing and health care never could, especially for those locked into fixed mortgage payments and with coverage from employer-based insurance or Medicare. To reduce it to the most simplistic terms, it’s a number; a number in the face of the average middle class or upper class American no matter where they go, typically by car, or what they do, just like the price of oil is a number, and the stock market, which often moves in the opposite direction of the cost of gas, is a number.

Here’s another number: 168. That is the number of people, most of whom were children, killed when the US fired a missile at an Iranian elementary school on February 28^th, 2026. No major news outlet has flashed 168 on its airwaves or in its pages at anywhere near the rate that they dissect gas prices. Senator Raphael Warnock, of Georgia, has called for an investigation of the bombing, while denouncing Donald Trump’s war policy and Pete Hegseth’s leadership more broadly, but its has failed to register as a salient issue with his political party, the mainstream media, or any of the prominent podcast bloviators who have managed to replace public intellectuals in the discourse.

None of this is to say that the bombing was kept secret. The legacy press did report on it multiple times. Pete Hegseth, who, according to rumor, his aides have nicknamed “Dumb McNamara,” has dodged questions about it from the press, and his boss, Dumb Nixon (?), claimed that Iran was responsible for bombing itself. “They are very inaccurate with their munitions,” Trump said. The insult might have struck Iranians as rich, who, as they bury their children, might recall that, during his first term in the White House, Trump eliminated the standards that Barack Obama put in place to avoid killing civilians in drone strikes targeting alleged terrorists. Obama’s own record was abysmal, as his administration killed far more innocent family members and neighbors of supposed terrorists than terrorists themselves. But a dissatisfied Trump wanted even more death. And now he is getting it.

War in Iran is unpopular with the American people, but even among those who disapprove, there is little discussion about the Iranians who have died and who will die as a result of a mindless exercise of US power. There is far greater scrutiny of how the war will influence everything from the cost of groceries to the midterm elections, and of course, an obsessive monitoring of the number on the digital screen at the fuel pump. A review of other numbers demonstrates that American leaders and many voters have a long tradition of ignoring the blood on their hands. To remain within relatively recent history with only two of countless examples, journalist Nick Turse details in his extraordinary and disturbing book, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, that the US killed two million civilians during the Vietnam War, most of them in deliberate acts with “heavy firepower.” After the war ended in 1975, the US left four million Vietnamese exposed to Agent Orange, which causes birth defects, brain damage, high rates of cancer, and early onset heart disease. Decades later, in 2003, the US invaded Iraq for the second time in thirty years, with a “shock and awe” campaign that led to an occupation that lasted for nearly nine years. Researchers at Brown University estimate that over 432,000 Iraqi civilians died during the US war of aggression, and that many more suffered premature deaths and debilitating diseases, in a repetition of Vietnam, due to the toxic chemicals, munitions, and military pollutants that lingered in the atmosphere long after the US press and population moved on to stories they found more fascinating, like the latest intrigue of Kardashian family and the guest list at Jeff Bezos’s wedding.

To track the priorities of the American attention span, one might want to consider a juxtaposition of stories from 2025, the contrast of which offers a nifty sociopolitical experiment. In July of that year, the Trump junta shut down USAID, an international organization that provided medical, infrastructural, and food assistance to millions of people in the developing world. Despite the too often violent and predatory aims of US foreign policy, USAID managed to save and otherwise improve the lives of many of the poorest people on the planet. For no discernible reason or purpose, other than racist psychopathy, Donald Trump and his then-henchman, Elon Musk, shuttered the agency, all while flashing wicked, deranged grins and making self-congratulatory posts on social media. As early as November of 2025, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health concluded that the end of USAID operations caused hundreds of thousands of people to die from starvation, complications of HIV/AIDS, and the effects of treatable diseases.

Also in the fall of 2025, the restaurant chain, Cracker Barrel, changed its logo, removing a depiction of an old man in bib overalls leaning on a barrel, in an attempt to adopt a more modern image. The fallout was intense. Republican lawmakers issued statements denouncing the corporate rebranding effort as “woke.” The political press summoned its resident geniuses to analyze what the logo change, and the anger it provoked, indicated about US politics, and the business press ran lengthy dissections of the decision and its aftermath. The conclusion is as painful as it is unavoidable: According to the calculus of US culture, as measurable by press coverage, political debate, and popular interest, Cracker Barrel’s logo is more important than the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Africa and the Middle East.

Given the enormous precedent, it is hardly surprising that the deaths of 168 Iranians, mostly children, can barely rate in comparison to tomorrow’s gas prices. It is something to keep in mind the next time a member of the Trump junta, US Senator, or cable news pundit with a flag pin on his lapel clears his throat to repeat a bromide about America’s respect for “human life,” “freedom,” and “democracy.”

The post Who’s Counting? Gas Prices, the Stock Market, and Dead Children appeared first on CounterPunch.org.