Even if you’ve been living under a rock (especially if you’ve been living under a rock) you know American paranoia has reached an all-time high. From Pizzagate to Meghan Markle-bot 3000, people’s weird conspiracy theories have never been greater. And the cultural frenzy is leading to some very questionable behavior.
The latest trend in the saga of paranoid practices is gasoline hoarding. Thanks to the Colonial Pipeline cyberhack causing fuel shortages across the eastern seaboard, the same folks who maniacally stockpiled toilet paper are now stockpiling gas. The only difference is, while a trunkful of toilet paper is mostly harmless, the unsafe storage practices of extremely flammable liquids have been known to cause explosions.
Exhibit A: A South Carolina woman who was attempting to outrun police, accidentally set herself on fire after her car, loaded with stores of gasoline, flipped over and burst into flames. The irony is, rather than trading in her Hummer for a car that doesn’t guzzle gas like a dehydrated camel, she turned it into a bomb on wheels and went full Mad Max with it.
And she’s not alone. With people needing gas to drive to work, hit the late-night drive-thru, and aimlessly cruise the interstate blasting Masked Wolf, the thought of losing these things got hoarders floored.
In fact, there have been so many reports of unsafe gasoline hoarding, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a statement asking everyone to please stop filling bags with gasoline and/or pouring flammable liquids on an open flame. Good to know.
Meanwhile, the hacker collective behind the Ransomware attack is laughing all the way to the bank. The Eastern European criminal group known as DarkSide managed to get Colonial Pipeline to pay $5 million in ransom. After the payout, DarkSide posted on their website that they’re disbanding, which is most certainly a joke in the same vein as America’s reaction to the gas shortage.
Retired hackers and pedestrian fireballs aside, the whole debacle seems like a golden opportunity for us to take stock of our current situation and ditch a few bad habits. But if the toilet paper fiasco of 2020 is any barometer, we’re pretty sure no one’s going to change one iota of their lifestyle. At least not until the next full-blown paranoia sweeps the nation and causes another momentary panic that’ll come and go faster than a flaming Hummer attempting to outrun the police.
Cover Photo: NBC/Contributor (Getty Images)
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