Education Quote by Dorothy Thompson

Panic over gas prices reads differently when it comes from Dorothy Thompson, the hard-nosed journalist who made a career out of treating politics as lived reality, not abstract chess. Her blunt questions land like a field report from the domestic front: if mobility collapses, everything else follows. Work, school, family obligations, civic life, even the basic promise of modernity (that you can go where you need to go) becomes conditional.

The intent isn’t to gripe; it’s to expose a hidden tax that doesn’t require legislation. “Ridiculous” is doing rhetorical work: it frames price spikes as irrational, almost indecent, and implies a failure of stewardship somewhere upstream. Thompson doesn’t name villains, but the subtext is accusatory: markets may set numbers, yet societies decide who absorbs the pain. Her focus on “people” signals class awareness. The affluent can treat fuel as an annoyance; everyone else experiences it as an emergency that quietly reorganizes life choices.

The line also captures a key American fragility: dependence on commuting. By pairing “work” and “school,” she collapses the adult economy and the next generation’s prospects into the same choke point. That’s why it works as cultural critique: it turns a commodity into a moral question about access and obligation.

In Thompson’s era, price shocks and supply anxiety were bound up with war, industrial power, and national direction. She’s translating that big geopolitics into an everyday metric: can the average person still move? If not, the social contract is already renegotiating itself, without anyone voting on it.