Standing alongside his son’s Ford pickup truck at a central Iowa gas station off Interstate 80, Francisco Castillo was not happy.
He had voted for President Donald Trump in the last election. He believed Trump had strengthened the economy in his first term, and he wanted more of that.
“I thought that he was going to bring some of those things back,” said Castillo, a 43-year-old factory worker. And now? “He said he was going to bring gas down, but the war in Iran is now making everything worse.”
It seems a country divided on so many fronts is finding common ground in pain at the pump, where the cost of the Iran war is hitting Americans squarely in the wallet and aggravating people across the political spectrum.



I wish Americans would show more horror at the Iranian schoolgirls that we killed last week. But then again, republicans lack empathy as a rule. It’s too much to ask for these people to care about those dead kids, or the dead kids the Trump raped and murdered to hide the evidence. Or the thousands upon thousands of dead kids Trump killed by cutting USAID. That’s all too abstract. Prices at the pump, that’s what does it.
We need to completely rebuild our society and values system.
Nobody seems to care about the MILLION PEOPLE who died in the first two months after cutting off USaid, I don’t really expect our species to care about anything anymore.
I will still fight for a better future and good outcomes, but I’ve seen just how dark and selfish our world is, and has always been, and I have no choice but to swallow the despair that we’re further from some kind of Star Trek utopia as we are from the extinction of the dinosaurs.