Columnist Susan Snyder: Taking a stand with a ‘gas-out’

Tuesday, March 14, 2000 | 9:45 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Tuesdays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@vegas.com or 259-4082.

Call it the revenge of the four-bangers.

Revenge for anyone who has ever driven 10 miles on a dark road with the headlights of a high-clearance, bumper-hugging behemoth glaring in the rearview mirror.

Revenge for anyone who has experienced the terror of having one of those fat-tired monsters part the water on a flooded street like the Red Sea, drowning in its wake all who travel closer to the ground.

Revenge for anyone who has felt the frustration of spending an entire 40-minute commute boxed in by towering, gas-guzzling, lack-of-humility vehicles with nothing to see but decals of Calvin peeing on something.

The price for a gallon of gasoline is creeping ever closer to $2. Driving those wheeled land vessels has to cost a fortune.

Neener! Neener!

However, it's costing all of us a fortune. And it's time to take a stand, according to an e-mail that's making its way around the country.

For those who have not seen it or are not yet saddled with this nagging, banal medium of communication called e-mail, the message calls for a "gas-out."

No, this does not refer to avoiding your favorite spicy foods.

The author -- Rhonda F. Salesberry, secretary to the graduate school dean of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston -- says all Canadians and Americans can bring oil companies to their knees by boycotting gas purchases April 7 through April 9. She says it worked on April 30 last year, when a massive gas-out in Canada and the United States forced gasoline prices to drop. (I don't recall it either).

Amazing claim though, considering it's pretty hard to tell why gas prices change. Could be oil production is slow. Could be a gas-out. Could be the sky is blue. Hard to say.

Still, Wanda Taylor figures it might be worth a try. Taylor, who manages a Las Vegas greeting-card shop, says she'll avoid petrol purchases that weekend.

She received the electronic message from a friend in another state and promptly forwarded it to everyone she knows, just as Salesberry asked.

Taylor says her son back in Indiana wasn't so sure he'd participate. He couldn't quite see how it would make a dent in the overall picture.

"He said everybody is just going to gas-up the day before. So you'll have one day of huge, excess sales just so you won't go out and buy it the next day," Taylor said.

But no one else has come up with a better idea, she said, and something has to be done about this robbery at the pumps. She recalled a trip to Death Valley National Park last year during which she purchased gas from the park's only pump.

It was $1.95 a gallon.

"I took a picture of it because nobody would ever believe I paid that much for gas. I'm cheap," the transplanted Hoosier said. "But it's Death Valley. I had no choice."

Well, here we are in mayhem, and we still don't have much of a choice.

If you decide to boycott in April, remember your local gas station owner is trying to feed his family or send his kid to college. So buy an extra Big Gulp or three.