We have not put the money into the infrastructure to prevent even accidental outages. The huge powerlines accross the nation can be brought down with a model rocket and some lightweight cable. We found this out by accident in Desert Storm when some of our chaff streamers fell onto power lines and shorted them out.
We allow speculation about the supply to drive the prices instead of supply/demand.
Worst of all we haven't taken any steps to isolate ourselves from this by moving to liberate ourselves from an oil based transportation system. We'll probably continue to need jet fuels for a long while but their's certainly no reason that we can't have trains, busses, cars, trucks which run on renewable energy sources from solar farms, wind driven generators, wave generators, and hydro electric dams. We'd need to limit the impact of these items but it would get us away from needing to deal with the middle east.