Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Falling Down USA

I've got some kind of fuckin' blogger-buildup. I miss writing. Ever since I passed through phase two of my training, I'm on some new phone queues that keep my phone ringing off the hook till market close, then I'm trying to catch up on stupid quizzes, following up on special cases, and emailing.

And lately between calls I've been reading a lot of news articles about the 35W brigde collapse. The news is saturated with articles about the survivors, samaritans, first responders, and the missing. Life in Minneapolis has been really fucked up. People are freaked out over the catastrophe and it's made most people really tense going over any bridge (and there are dozens of them--what with a river separating two major cities). Add to that the extra traffic jams and fuller busses, and you get an entire metro area full of people on the brink. It's really terrifying.

If there is an upside, it's that this incident received national attention and writers are beginning to make links between our bridge and other infrastructure deterioration around the country. It's shameful that people have to be injured and killed before anything gets done, but I'm glad that public outrage is strong enough to put the heat on our public officials. For years they've stood at the pulpit and religiously preached No New Taxes, while getting their dicks sucked in the back of the rectory by 92 year old Pohlad in exchange for building him a shiny new half-billion dollar stadium, while our roads, bridges, schools, libraries, and sewers crumble apart.

Officials announced within hours of the collapse that there was no evidence of terrorism, and this was supposed to somehow lend us relief. Call me jaded, but I'd be more comforted if it WAS intentionally sabotaged, but no, it just fell the fuck down all on its own. Who needs to be afraid of fucking religious nationalist nutjobs coming into the country to blow shit up when the shit is just falling apart on its own. I mean, if their goal is to destroy our infrastructures so that we can't function, what better way to deter terrorism than to let everything rot so there's nothing left for them to wreck?

Cut off the nose to spite the face--great domestic policy, BUSH.*

Is it election time YET?




*May Bush be reincarnated as a single mother with HIV, with Tim Pawlenty as the baby's daddy and Cheney as the welfare case worker.

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