A Bridge to Facing Reality?

The Minneapolis (my home town) bridge collapse may at least force us to come to grips with a pressing reality. Though others will no doubt say similar things, it can't hurt to add my voice.

I am a Minneapolis native and though I no longer live there I still consider it my home town. I have driven across the bridge countless times and can still picture it vividly. My brother's office window only two blocks away overlooks the bridge. We see and hear about disaster and death every day but it is eerie to see it happen to places you know.

As people/citizens we want to know that if we cross a bridge that that bridge is safe. Aside from a few fucked-in-the-head Looneytarians, we all expect government to keep public spaces and public works safe and in good repair. There really is no greater mandate or role of government than to keep citizens safe.

Government cannot keep citizens safe without the involvement of citizens. Since it is inefficient and undesirable for everyone to take rotating cooperative turns at all public service tasks (military/police/construction/maintenance/teaching/etc.) we pay taxes so that the government can hire people dedicated to tasks necessary to serve the people. Taxes are the way we keep ourselves safe. When politicians, for whatever reason, do not properly employ tax dollars to keep citizens safe then that is a betrayal of the people. Cutting taxes so much that it stops the ability for government to pay for essential services to keep the public safe (for example, maintaining bridges) is a betrayal of the people. That betrayal has been happening for years now and those caught on that bridge in Minneapolis were victims of that betrayal. It is the same as maintenance on a car. If you don't spend the money to change your oil, eventually the car breaks down. What good is the money you saved now?

It is long past time for a real and accurate dialog about taxes in this country. Not the BS dialog offered by the right-wing and their corporate media where taxes are portrayed subtly or openly as some kind of theft. We need a dialog that acknowledges the reality that taxes and government spending is something that we ALL benefit from and barring corruption and inefficiency, we get what we pay for. We need a dialog that honestly asks the question: "what society do we want, what services do we need to achieve that, and how much do we have to pay to get there?" We need a dialog that judges politicians and their rhetoric not in how much they cut taxes but in how much they are giving us for our tax dollars. If we continue to not have this dialog then we are a failure as a society and more than just bridges will collapse.

To put it into vivid perspective: The American Society of Civil Engineers says there are more than 70,000 bridges that are rated "structurally deficient" - the same rating given the Minneapolis bridge. The ASCE further states it would cost more than $188 billion, or $9.4 billion a year over 20 years, to repair and replace these bridges. Ironically, that is the amount we spend monthly on the occupation in Iraq (Source: http://usgovinfo.about.com/...

Ask yourself: where are your tax dollars going and what are you getting for them?