Gas prices are a common “around the water cooler” conversation starter for adults. What they forget is the effect skyrocketing gas prices has on seniors living on minimum wage.

Each week is met with dread to fill the tank. With news that prices may raise to $5 by spring, the anxiety only heightens.

This is especially true for Jake Williams ’12, a delivery boy at Sal’z Pizza. He has to drive his own car, and pay his own gas – a practice common in most pizza places. For him, a $5 gas price tag would cost him an extra $25 a week. “I have to fill up 40 bucks a week. If gas prices go up to $5 per gallon, that means I’ll be filling up 60 or 65 a week,” he explains. “[This] is getting absurd.”

Nina Caraluzzi ’12 echoes this statement, calling gas prices “insane.”

When asked, Matt Correnty ’12 only had unprintable expletives to say about the state of gas prices.

The tribulations in the Middle East have been hurting parents’ wallets for years. At seventeen and eighteen years old, Bethel High School students are starting to feel the strain. If these troubles continue, what’s in store for gas prices? Will they one day parallel the breathtaking price for cigarettes?

One can only hope that the presidential candidates are speaking the truth when they claim they’re pursuing a $2 price tag. Even politicians have to fuel their car.