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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.
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."
© 2007 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
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53 Comments so far
Show AllRe: accra0306 August 4th, 2007 2:09 pm post....Well said young man/woman, very well said indeed. BMA, Ft Worth, Texas
CRCox said, "Minnesota is the last sane place in this sadly adrift country to live, and it's because Minnesotans actually give a crap about how the EVERYONE is treated."
Every time I hear about the bridge crashing, I get flashbacks to when I lived closeby in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. I remember all the people in power trying to undermine our lives (the lives of the lower classes) because they wanted their New World Order so bad.
The Powers of Saint Cloud had all the lower-class people with college degrees disenfranchised. The Cities did it, too. Anything to keep their precious class-system! Anything to protect the established middle-class from "rogue educated people" from taking "their jobs."
In the late 1990's, "the Gay 90's," Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Saint Cloud newspapers and evening news declared that there was a "flush" economy: That there were more jobs than bodies to fill them! Ironic that I and the legions of others, those believing that we could get a decent job if we got an education, could not find any decent work! Instead, we were considered a "threat" by employers because we were so smart and education that we couldn't get the shit jobs we would have been allowed to do if we hadn't gotten an education and we weren't allowed to have jobs that were always given to the traditional, inherited middle-class.
I'm writing books about this! Books and books and books.
But the ONE THING I write about the most is about those bogus newscasts and how devastating they were and how they ruined lives, including mine! What the True Purpose of those newscasts was to sow and spread civil wars in Minnesotan communities. Everyone was riding my hump over those newscasts! People would say to me, "There must be something really wrong with you if you can't get a job because the newscaster from Minneapolis said last night there were more jobs than people to fill them..."
I was called a monster and other things...So were my colleagues, caught in the same vicious propaganda web.
From September 1991 until I left America (January 25, 2001) I looked for work all the time. I wasn't even that particular: I would have been happy to get para-professional work! But no, I wasn't even allowed to have that! The number of good jobs had already begun to shrink so there was a giant, quiet backlash against the educated lower-classes from getting the better work.
And I applied for work all the time in the Twin Cities. I crossed that I-35 bridge many times looking for work.
But back to the propaganda the Powers of Minnesota mercilessly spread. Almost every time (and this was at least once a week or more) the bright, sunny, girl or boy "next door" newscaster proclaimed all this non-existent work, I got raped and or beaten by my husband because I wasn't getting any of these jobs! I was violently raped and sodomized, too.
I could always trace my husband's anger to the newscasts and articles in the Saint Cloud Times. This is because after he saw one of those newscasts or read something in the paper about all these excess jobs, he'd throw it in my face, start turning the environment black with his anger and seethe until he exploded!
So I had a fire under my ass to get enough work to support myself so I could leave him. A professional, I never let anyone know my true horror because as a "professional," I had to keep my reputation in good order because only "good" people are hired for "good" jobs.
A Scientist, researcher, scholar and one of the smartest people on the planet (IQ and GRE Logic test scores), I went out and did the research to prove to my husband that the media was lying about the available work in Minnesota and our area. I proved it. I went out and counted jobs available and the number of unemployed or under-employed. The numbers didn't match! I spent money I couldn't afford to spend calling long-distance to newsrooms asking editors or whoever was there, where did they get their information about all these jobs? No one ever had an answer! They just said they got it from a "government report" but when I asked them for the name of this report or a phone number of the government office that released this information, no one seemed to have it! One time, I did get a phone number and I called it legions of times. Every time, I got an answering machine!
I thought if I could "prove" to my husband that I was caught in the middle of evil propaganda and that those jobs didn't exist, he would stop raping me and direct his anger at the real villains (social controllers socially-engineering culture to bring back the Old White Man Way).
Also, I also did research about how low-paying jobs increased the likelihood of workers dying prematurely. All these people I knew for many years started dropping dead prematurely. I knew it wasn't normal so I wanted to know why...
Always so good, always so innocent, always so idealistic, I took my research to the same people that were causing it: The Politicians who were being controlled by City Fathers, or the established elite. All it got me was constant phone threats, a bomb in my car that turned out to be a dud, racial threats on my door and walk, kidnapped and threatened by the police and a "goon" beating by a stranger in a grocery store. I also had a "near-death" experience when my husband put a pillow over my head and blacked me out on August 29, 1999, the height of the "Gold Rush" days of yore.
In the end, I had to run for my Life! Run from my husband trying to kill me again because I "failed" him by not getting one of those fabulous jobs that supposedly were "everywhere" and because I pissed off my "Christian" society because when no one else would do the research to prove hypocrisy, I did it.
I spent twelve years in several universities to earn four university degrees to find myself thrown in the gutter as a worker! I earned degrees in areas of studies that "guaranteed" I'd get work: Marketing, Management, Radio/Television/Film and my master's degree is in Information Media: Training and Human Resources Development which is really a mask for what it really is: Industrial psychology to control people. MIND CONTROL. It was an elite psychology area of study that was only taught in two universities in America. They didn't want me (or the others like me) in graduate school, either, but they had to admit me and tolerate me because of my grades, intelligence and perfect score on the GRE.
I still find it bitter and ironic that I can get into any graduate school in the world that will admit females, but I couldn't even get a job sorting letters or registering voters for Stearns County. In both those jobs, they hired middle-class teenage girls in high school to avoid hiring me and the other educated applicants that came from the middle-class! That's how desperate society was to keep their precious class system!
As for my spousal abuse, sure I could have gone to the Women's Shelter, but Stearns County would have only paid for me to stay there a month. Then I would have been sent to the County Homeless Shelter and would have only been allowed to stay there for a month. Then I would have been homeless, sleeping under the Eastside Bridge (another one about to fall) with the rest of the homeless women, some of whom ironically were also educated! Because I had no children in my house, there were no safety nets for women like me. Either we found or stayed with male sponsors, or we became homeless and targets for the vigilante male rapists that "punished" homeless women with rape and robbery in our community.
This was my world and the hopeless world of other good people who tried to help themselves in a class-entrenched national and local society.
So don't say Minnesota is the last liberal outpost. It's not. It's just as evil as the other states: rife with racism, classism, misogyny, corruption and the corruption of capitalism.
I remember ten years ago that a report was published stating how there were over 30,000 bridges in Minnesota that were in desperate need of repair. But no one in Power did anything about it but proclaim and toast a "full economy" where "everyone who wanted to work" could have it. They could have hired us to fix those bridges but no one wanted to hire us for anything but the most degrading and lowest paid jobs of all because we had to be "punished" for getting an education when it was legally allowable but not socially allowable.
In the end, I had 17 casual jobs and I was lucky if I got one day of work a week! And I was getting more work than my other educated friends! Work was so difficult to get and in the end, I couldn't get enough to support myself on so I could leave my violent husband.
Never say Minnesota is Nice. Minnesota is Mean. It is a micro-Savage Society to the macro, national Savage Society.
Read how they kill invisibly, read my research that they can't break: http://www.hiddenmurder.blogspot.com
CORRECTION. My letter says, "they hired middle-class teenage girls in high school to avoid hiring me and the other educated applicants that came from the middle-class!" What I mean to say is that they purposely hired under-age, high-school girls from the middle-class over the educated adults of the underclass.
As for the bomb in my car, it's all on public record because the fire and police department was there.
Minnesota is just as evil as any of the other states. They just kill you "nicer" if you don't crawl on your hands and knees for them. Martha