Iranians Wake Up in 1974

My first job as a high school student was in a car wash near my Westminster, CA home. I spent most afternoons and Saturdays during my senior year pumping gas and was there during the first Arab oil embargo against the U.S. Gasoline was in short supply, prices rose (though they look pretty good by today's standards), and for awhile we had odd/even gas rationing and had to limit purchases to 10 gallons. It was a royal pain in the butt for us pump jockeys since we took the brunt of the customer frustration.

Today the citizens of Iran, a country which sits on a sea of oil, are experiencing their own version of 1974. While the country has plenty of crude oil, it has practically no refining capacity and therefore has to import nearly all of its refined products. The result is gas rationing and the citizens are angry:

Angry Iranians have torched petrol stations in protests against the sudden imposition of fuel rationing in one of the world’s most oil rich nations.

The rationing was announced on Tuesday only three hours before it was due to begin at midnight, leading to long queues at service stations as Iranians rushed out to fill up before the clampdown kicked in.

In the capital, youths set a car and petrol pumps ablaze at a station in the residential Pounak area of northwestern Tehran, throwing stones and shouting angry slogans denouncing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who came to power in an election based largely on his promises to improve the Islamic republic’s faltering economy.

Of course, burning gas stations is hardly going to fix the problem, but a little citizen anger against the mad mullahs would be a good thing. Perhaps the people will be able to figure out a way to get rid of the religious nuts that are destroying the nation's economy and replace them with a government that will want to be a good citizen in the global community.