Thank Goodness, People are Saying It

After swallowing 30 years of small-government rhetoric, our infrastructure, once the pride of the developed world, is falling apart around us. We're reaping what we've sown.

Strib Editorial: Public Anger Will Follow

Howie Klein: With Republicans in charge, you get the inability for a society to act effectively and efficiently in the case of unforseen tragedies like Katrina or you get bridges with structural problems not being attended to.

On Wednesday, when I went to work out, I saw a news report about a part of America that most people barely know exists. There was a shot of a damagaed roadway - part of a broken bridge in Minneapolis. I thought, "thats not so bad," then the camera backed up, and I saw an entire bridge - a large bridge - on the ground, in the river, broken, with cars and trucks scattered about, overturned, and on top of each other. My eyes widened and I needed to know what bridge it was. Was it that bridge I used to cross from Hudson to Minnesota on I94 all the time? They mentioned Minneapolis and the Mississippi River. It wasn't until I actually saw the map and "35W" on the screen before I was sure. I keep forgetting that the river at the border at that point is the St. Croix, not the Mississippi.

So it wasn't a bridge that I crossed a lot, or one that my mom and sister might cross, but I knew people in the cities and Minnesota that could have been there, and I got nervous. When I got home, I send out a few messages and made a few posts to blogs, LJ, MySpace, and FaceBook to make sure that the people I with whom I am still in touch, along with their relatives and friends, were ok.

I didn't turn on the TV. I didn't want the innane commentary and commercials for getting it up or behemouth vehicles in my head. I just looked at the Google News results, picking my sources critically. Minnesota sources, the BBC, and, of course, Alternet. At one point during the evening, I noticed that the number one and two most read stories on the BBC News site were both about the bridge collapse. I checked Alternet to see if anyone was making appropriate political commentary, because it certainly is warrented at this point.

Bridges should not just collapse like that, not in the industrialized world. That they do is a sign of serious transportation department neglect, and who controls transportation departments? We do, through our elected officials who decide the funding for such departments. Proper funding allows proper payment and resources for departments. Higher paying jobs attract better applicants and we should have the best engineers working on our ever important highway system.

This isn't brain surgery or rocket science.

The multiple inspections missed something, and while we're all busy destroying and then fucking up the rebuilding of Iraq, our own infrastructure crumbles.

Anyway, I saw a Huffington Post feed article about the event and went to check out the commentary. The long and short of the little I saw were people arguing with Republican "Concern Trolls" reacting to people making knee jerk political commentary with bullshit responses like "wait until they fish the bodies out of the water."

Ugh, give me a fucking break. I'm 2,000 miles away, I can't do a damn thing to help anyone at this point. And what happens when they do fish the bodies out? "People died, blah blah blah, I don't want to admit that my ideologies support policies that have failed in every test and implementation because they actually do work to line my pockets and I don't give a shit about anyone but my own family." One of the trolls had the screen name of country club republican, but with a different spelling and combined as one word. What idiot is actually proud of that kind of detachment from the way of life for ordinary Americans?

Needless to say, I wasn't happy with what I read. By Thursday evening, I hadn't seen a major article or blog post on Alternet yet about the elephant in the room. But on Friday evening, people started to say it. Even evidence started to appear that contradicted the popular line. The bridge was just barely over the line in the last inspections. And the fabulous Republican government that suburban Minnesotans elected in 2002 erred on the side of saving money instead of saving lives. Of course, there weren't that many lives lost. Conservatives are probably going to get needlessly religious on us too.

But on Friday came what this city's fire chief called a miraculous turn of events: the prospect that relatively few lives were lost.
- Source

If you read the article, you'll see that it wasn't a damn miracle. The fact that so many people experienced the collapse without injury was due to many factors, mainly the bridge design and the status of the river on that particular day. Minneapolis and most of the drivers were lucky, just as I was lucky that my brain injury wasn't serious enough to permanently disable me.

But there is no guarantee that next time, and if we keep on the status quo [and I have no faith that our do-nothing-but-spend-money-on-war-and-iPhone society will do a damn thing] there will be a next time, we will be so lucky. We care more about Iraq's infrastructure than our own. How many more bridges need to collapse or aging pipes need to explode in America before we start to see some major capitol projects from the government in our own damn country? Maybe all the people that lose their jobs when we abolish the biggest and most bloated, un-healthy Health Insurance companies can get jobs in the improvement of our infrastructure.

Remember how The Jungle, one book, incited our nation, even our president to improve the quality of our national food supply? Now even flooded cities and kids dying from toothaches can't inspire change. How many more disasters and tragedies before we elect and pay taxes to a government that works?