[thechat] the bridge!

[e]

We Americans just don't get it. Everyone in MN wants LOW TAXES and a $500
million dollar sports stadium to give as a gift to billionaires.

Another view: http://www.raisethehammer.org/blog.asp?id=719


And a (subscription) op-ed piece in our local paper:
http://www.startribune.com/10204/story/1339911.html


Nick Coleman: Public anger will follow our sorrow

The cloud of dust above the Mississippi that rose after the Interstate 35W
bridge collapsed Wednesday evening has dissipated. But there are other dark
clouds still hanging over Minneapolis and Minnesota.

By Nick Coleman, Star Tribune

Last update: August 02, 2007 - 2:26 PM
The cloud of dust above the Mississippi that rose after the Interstate 35W
bridge collapsed Wednesday evening has dissipated. But there are other dark
clouds still hanging over Minneapolis and Minnesota.

The fear of falling is a primal one, along with the fear of being trapped or
of drowning.

Minneapolis suffered a perfect storm of nightmares Wednesday evening, as
anyone who couldn't sleep last night can tell you. Including the parents who
clench their jaws and tighten their hands on the wheel every time they drive
a carload of strapped-in kids across a steep chasm or a rushing river. Don't
panic, you tell yourself. The people in charge of this know what they are
doing. They make sure that the bridges stay standing. And if there were a
problem, they would tell us. Wouldn't they?

What if they didn't?

The death bridge was "structurally deficient," we now learn, and had a
rating of just 50 percent, the threshold for replacement. But no one appears
to have erred on the side of public safety. The errors were all the other
way.

Would you drive your kids or let your spouse drive over a bridge that had a
sign saying, "CAUTION: Fifty-Percent Bridge Ahead"?

No, you wouldn't. But there wasn't any warning on the Half Chance Bridge.
There was nothing that told you that you might be sitting in your
over-heated car, bumper to bumper, on a hot summer day, thinking of dinner
with your wife or of going to see the Twins game or taking your kids for a
walk to Dairy Queen later when, in a rumble and a roar, the world you knew
would pancake into the river.

There isn't any bigger metaphor for a society in trouble than a bridge
falling, its concrete lanes pointing brokenly at the sky, its crumpled cars
pointing down at the deep waters where people disappeared.

Only this isn't a metaphor.

The focus at the moment is on the lives lost and injured and the heroic
efforts of rescuers and first-responders - good Samaritans and uniformed
public servants. Minnesotans can be proud of themselves, and of their
emergency workers who answered the call. But when you have a tragedy on this
scale, it isn't just concrete and steel that has failed us.

So far, we are told that it wasn't terrorists or tornados that brought the
bridge down. But those assurances are not reassuring.

They are troubling.

If it wasn't an act of God or the hand of hate, and it proves not to be just
a lousy accident - a girder mistakenly cut, a train that hit a support -
then we are left to conclude that it was worse than any of those things,
because it was more mundane and more insidious: This death and destruction
was the result of incompetence or indifference.

In a word, it was avoidable.

That means it should never have happened. And that means that public anger
will follow our sorrow as sure as night descended on the missing.

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that
of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It's been popular with a lot of
voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent
gas tax increase - the first in 20 years - last spring and millions were
lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even
if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous
curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but
wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

I'm not just pointing fingers at Pawlenty. The outrage here is not partisan.
It is general.

Both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap, and both have
dithered and dallied and spent public wealth on stadiums while scrimping on
the basics.

How ironic is it that tonight's scheduled groundbreaking for a new Twins
ballpark has been postponed? Even the stadium barkers realize it is in poor
taste to celebrate the spending of half a billion on ballparks when your
bridges are falling down. Perhaps this is a sign of shame. If so, it is
welcome. Shame is overdue.

At the federal level, the parsimony is worse, and so is the negligence. A
trillion spent in Iraq, while schools crumble, there aren't enough cops on
the street and bridges decay while our leaders cross their fingers and
ignore the rising chances of disaster.

And now, one has fallen, to our great sorrow, and people died losing a
gamble they didn't even know they had taken. They believed someone was
guarding the bridge.

We need a new slogan and we needed it yesterday:

"No More Collapses."