A Nation on Empty In 1973, America stalled—not just at the gas pump but in the very myth of its endless momentum. The oil embargo didn’t just choke fuel lines; it ruptured the country’s carefully constructed image of invincibility. For years, the world turned on oil that came cheaply and without question, a silent partner in the American dream. But that October, the dream hit a barricade. OPEC turned the taps off, and with it, they turned off the hum of suburban commutes, Friday night cruises, and the promise that progress would always roar forward on four wheels. Gas stations, those unremarkable waypoints of modern life, became the crisis’s stage. In the bitter dawn, drivers queued in silence, their cars coughing exhaust into the frigid air. There was no camaraderie here, just the brittle tension of a society realizing it wasn’t as self-reliant as it thought. Fights broke out over imagined slights, fists clenching steering wheels, and eyes darting to the "OUT" signs looming like obituaries over empty pumps. America wasn’t just waiting in line; it was waiting to figure out what it had become. Inside homes, under dim lightbulbs powered by the same dwindling resources, life carried on with a sense of quiet resignation. The evening news framed the crisis as temporary, manageable, but the numbers didn’t lie. Families flipped through newspapers and scanned for gas station schedules as if decoding war maps. Children played on carpets, unaware that their parents were recalculating not just budgets but futures. Even the TV sets that had broadcast the moon landing a few years prior now flickered with stories of scarcity, of limits. The "post-war boom" wasn’t booming anymore—it was sputtering. Out on the roads, the night was eerier than before, the silence of empty highways punctuated only by the hum of occasional passing cars. Closed gas stations, their fluorescent lights humming against the dark, became monuments to dependency. America had built itself on motion, on the belief that forward was the only direction. But in 1973, forward seemed farther away than ever.