Busted Trust: A Bridge Fallen
by C. L. Cook
 The woman on the six o'clock news was indignant. She was speaking from the site of the horrendous collapse of a highway bridge in Minneapolis.
The bridge had fallen during afternoon rush hour yesterday; fallen into the Mississippi River. So far, the C.B.C. reports authorities confirm seven people dead, but there are dozens of cars at the bottom of the river, their occupants too certainly dead.
With wreckage as background, between flashes of the highway camera video documenting the actual collapse, the indignant woman told the teevee news cameras; "This is America; bridges don't just fall down in America!"
Denying her eyes, and the cries of the survivors, and the growing
numbers of worried relatives arriving at the ruin, this American could
not allow the reality of the situation, going as it does against her
ingrained, even doctrinaire perception of her society. Well, yes
Virginia: Bridges don't just fall down in America - or anywhere else -
they must be allowed to tumble.
Reports are already filing in on
the sorry condition of the doomed span. It's structural integrity was
inspected and deemed "deficient" more than two years ago, yet nothing
was done. Like the levees broken and breached that drown New Orleans in
2005, fiscal expediency and the reluctance of any one person or agency
to definitively act to challenge the status quo, stop the traffic, and
close the bridge resulted in calamity.
Instead, officials on all levels went through the
motions, reports were dutiful written and forgotten, and every day the
cars rolled on, back and forth across the river, unknowing players in a
game of Russian Roulette; a game forced upon them not necessarily by
evil intention, but by the banality of inattention.
Minnesota
is known as the City of Lakes, and the Mill City, the Wikipedia
informs. It is the twin of St. Paul, and together the two cities
divided by water comprise the sixteenth largest metropolis in the
United States, its prosperity always demanding mastery of the twin
rivers, above the confluence of the mighty Mississippi and the
Minnesota.
The Dakota people lived here before the settlers, and the
name of the colonial city is believed a confluence of sorts of the
Dakota word Mennehaha, meaning water, and of course the Greek polis, or
city. Water, and the river so central to the origins and prosperity of
Minneapolis is its core, its essence.
So how then could something as essential as the means to maintain the city's life be left to fester, and rot, and fail?
As
with its sister city of disasters past in the south, Minneapolis was
yesterday taught the lesson all of America's cities are destined too to
learn, should this disastrous course, set upon before even that master
of the same, George took office. Since at least the time of Ronald
Reagan, and the adoption of voodoo, "trickle down economics"
first and last, by successive administrations, (immersed as they are in
the corporate ethic) all that matters is the quest for quick profit.
The bottom line is
the only line: Alpha and Omega, money is what counts. Picking up
the costs to keep the show going is something for the next sucker to
worry over.
The majority of
infrastructure in America, and Canada too, is the legacy of the
sixties, and Nixonian years that followed. Since, America has,
infra-structurally speaking, been living on the laurels of a former time,
and is now beginning to show its age. George vowed to - and I swear he smirked
as he did - "rebuild."
And no doubt there will be a fat "no-bid"
contract ripe for the plucking; naturally granted to one of his
favourites - only purist sleaze need apply.
It will be a shoddy job,
corners cut at every profitable convenience, and it will come in at
twice, nay four-fold the estimate.
And ten, or perhaps
twenty years down the road, another indignant American woman will be
standing on the bank of the Mississippi, a wreckage framing her
outrage, but there will be no incredulity in that woman's voice.
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