Holding My Breath Across Bridges

I admit it: I was a weird kid. Of course, most little kids are weird in some way. Some children are really, really bizarre, while others just have some well hidden little personality quirks. I’d like to think that I fell into that second group, but it really doesn’t matter much to me now that I’m older. But I digress. One of the strangest things that I used to do when I was a small child was to hold my breath whenever we crossed a bridge in our car. I figured it would give me a better chance if the bridge collapsed and we fell into whatever huge body of water that we were crossing over. I had a novice’s faith in the integrity of whatever large Ford, or Chevy, or Mercury, or Buick that carried us, and assumed it would survive a long drop into the river. Bridges scared the shit out of me, but I believed in big American cars. Like I said, I was a little weird as a kid.

I don’t think anyone in my family was aware of it, but I may have mentioned it to my fellow backseat passengers (my two older brothers) on one of our family’s many treks across this grand land of ours, with its many bodies of water. In fact, my brothers may have gotten me started doing it, now that I think about it. I’ll never know for sure, now that they’re gone. They probably wouldn’t admit it anyway, and they loved to tease their little brother. Also, I don’t think my dad planned trips that required lots of trips over bridges, but we sure seemed to take more than our fair share. We crossed the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers on a regular basis on our trips to Watts Bar Dam Resort. We passed over the Potomac, the Cumberland, the Miami, the Niagara, and countless other streams. Each time I held my breath. At least as long as I could. By the time I road across the mighty Mississippi, I was over that particular phobia. Besides, that was a long bridge.

Oddly enough, at time we driving all over the place, in the ‘50’s, ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, America’s highways were in pretty good shape. The Interstate Highway system was fairly new, still under construction in many places, and most of the bridges we crossed were in top shape. I really shouldn’t have worried about the bridges back then. These days, however, it’s a different story.

I’m not a big fan of excessive taxation, or unnecessary government programs, but I don’t mind having to pay taxes for things I consider essential. I want my food inspected to make sure it isn’t contaminated. I like to breathe (relatively) clean air and drink (mostly) unpolluted water. I understand the necessity for a military to protect our nation from foreign invasion, because there’s always some nut job out there. Being more liberal in my outlook, I also think it is a good thing to help less fortunate people make a better life for themselves. It’s also awful nice to be able to hop in the car and drive anywhere in the country on nice, safe roads.

Recently, the US Congress was wrestling with a law to prop up our highway funding, which is running out of money. Highways are funded through the use of taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel (taxes on diesel fuel are higher than gas taxes, probably because trucking companies pass this tax right back to consumers, without us realizing it, although private citizens driving diesels just have to suck it up). Even though the costs of everything associated with building and maintaining our roads and bridges have increased significantly over the years, the gasoline tax has not been increased. That’s why the highway fund is running out of money.

Congress is reluctant to increase the gasoline tax because people (including the small percentage of people who actually bother to vote) will notice it right away. Higher gas taxes will increase the overall cost of gasoline, and those soccer moms and dads that have to pay $100 to fill-up their huge SUVs will have to shell out $120. That might mean cutting back on a couple of caramel mocha lattés at Starbucks every week, and that would seriously crimp their already strained lifestyles. The other side of that coin is that increasing the gasoline tax is extremely regressive. It falls heavily on the folks with less money, those living paycheck to paycheck. Absolutely no one in Congress has mentioned this aspect of the problem, in fact many seem to favor regressivity these days. But Congress finally put a couple of proposals together and hashed out a funding bill.

The bill that was proposed included a “creative” side, because apparently every single Senator and Representative is scared shitless of telling people that we really need to be paying a little more for gas in order to drive on safe roads and bridges. They haven’t bothered to ask the oil executives if they might be able to squeak by on salaries of $30 million a year instead of $40 million, which might smooth out the rise in gas prices, because, they’re afraid the oil execs might have to scale back on donations to their favorite Congressmen and Senators. One of the ideas proposed to postpone the inevitable included something called “pension smoothing.” I know that when I smooth my bedspread, the wrinkles disappear. My question is, when you “smooth” a pension, does the money disappear? I bet it does.

Making laws is a messy business. There’s an old saying that the two things you should never watch being made are laws and sausages (presumably because you won’t like what you see).  I was flipping through the channels the other night and caught a segment on the Food Network with host Guy Fieri at a little restaurant known for making everything they served on site. They were making the restaurant’s famous sausage.  Going against previous advice, I threw caution to the wind and watched them make sausage. They used a variety of highly recognizable cuts of meat (no pig hooves, hearts or snouts), combined them with a variety of fresh herbs and spices, and pushed it all through the sausage grinder. Guy pronounced the resulting sausage delicious, and I could tell he was being sincere.

It makes me wonder why we can’t be more transparent when we make our laws, or attempt to fund the laws already on the books. Funding highway construction is a good thing all around. It provides jobs for construction workers. It provides jobs for people who make concrete and steel (not to mention orange cones and barrels). It provides jobs for restaurant workers who feed construction workers, and for the folks that sell them their boots and jeans. The list goes on and on. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this country could use a few more jobs for its shrinking middle class. It also gives us safe highways, and safe bridges.

In 1967, as I was getting over my fear of bridges, the Silver Bridge which spanned the Ohio River collapsed at rush hour, killing dozens. It turns out that there was a flaw in the design of this bridge that had been in service since 1928. When you combined the design flaw with inadequate maintenance and insufficient inspections, a disaster resulted. A cry went up for more inspections for bridges, and a renewed focus on our nation’s deteriorating infrastructure. However, as usual, our short national attention span shifted to other matters.

Fast forward forty years to August 1, 2007, when a bridge on Interstate Highway 35, crossing the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed, killing 13 and injuring 143 people. Once again, a cry went up to do something about our crumbling infrastructure. Nothing significant ever happened. There have been other collapsed bridges in the past, as well as few instances where a timely inspection prevented disaster, but overall we’re still in the same boat (perhaps ferry boats might be safer alternative, unless you’re in Korea).

As the current Congress fought against time (it was close to their summer “recess” after all), the Senate apparently blinked, or just quit fighting, and adopted the House’s bill that will extend highway funding way into the future…um, I mean until next May. This, of course, does nothing to address the underlying problem.

I think that the real problem here is all of us. We allow our elected representatives behave like mildly repentant frat boys and sorority girls. They get a long recess from their jobs, and as the time approaches, they cram for finals. It’s as if they were telling their professors “I’m sorry I didn’t get that paper in on time, but hey, my plane’s leaving for Cancun in a few hours and I need to get my party on, you know? I promise I’ll be hittin’ the books extra hard when I get back. At least as soon as I get over my monster hangover.” Like the tired professor, we’re probably happy just to get rid of them. At least they won’t screw anything up here while they’re out of town. We have become the ultimate enablers.

We need to tell them that this isn’t acceptable. We need to tell them that they’ve failed their assignment, and that they are about to be expelled. We need to cut off their free tuition. But even if we stop giving them money, we’ve already seen to it that other “people” are free to buy their votes, and they’re not even people. They’re corporations, special interest groups, and lobbyists. If we want a better country for all of us, we have to stop allowing our major decisions to be made by a handful of wealthy individuals who only want what they think is best for them. But we have become like sheep being led to slaughter, afraid to speak out in our own best interest, and content with our situation right up to the moment that our throats are slit.

Having a well-functioning society requires effort on the part of its participants. It will take some extra work to turn things around. Will it ever happen? I won’t be holding my breath, not even crossing bridges.

The Silver Bridge, 1967

Fourth of July Memories

It was Wednesday evening, the second day of July, and I was preparing myself an after-work cocktail when I noticed that I was getting low on vodka. No problem, I thought, I’ll pick up a fresh bottle when I go to the Giant Eagle for groceries on Friday. But something seemed wrong about that. I smiled when I discovered the flaw in my logic because I remembered my late brother Gary’s favorite saying this time of year: “If you want a fifth for the Fourth, you have to get it by the third.”

Gary came up with this little chestnut of a reminder when he was living with me at my home on Lake Mohawk sometime in the early 1990’s, and I had heard him repeat it more times than I care to recall. Of course, since Gary passed away six years ago, I hadn’t heard it lately. It was a bittersweet memory that caused my smile. When one lives at Lake Mohawk, entertaining friends on the Fourth of July is pretty much of a foregone conclusion, especially since the end of my dock pointed directly at the spot on the dam where they launched the fireworks show as darkness fell. Gary always wanted to be sure that we would have a sufficient supply of liquid libations on hand for the party, therefore, he developed his little memory aid. Not that I ever recall that a shortage had plagued our festivities.

The reason you needed to get your booze before the Fourth was that Wood’s Grocery store, our local State Liquor Store franchise, closed on the Fourth of July. The owner probably could have done a pretty good business if he stayed open, but I don’t think he really needed the money, and he liked a good party himself. I’m not sure if any other State Store was open on the 4th (Ohio has some archaic liquor laws), but it didn’t really matter. We never left the lake on the holiday because there was always a line of cars at the gate where all guests had to check in. Also, although we tried to go water skiing almost every day in Ohio’s short summer season, we rarely took the boat out on the 4th because the lake was packed with rookies who didn’t know what they were doing when it came to boats. Of course, exceptions were made.

One year some out of town guests pleaded with us to take them skiing, not that they actually knew how to water ski. Gary and I usually had good success teaching people to ski, and despite choppy conditions (think of Lake Erie on a windy day) combined with far too many boats sharing the lake, we got our rookie up and skiing. As we approached a particularly congested point near the north end of the lake, I noticed that our skier was beginning to falter. Please don’t fall here, I thought, followed closely by our skiing student doing precisely what I didn’t want to see. I cut the engine as soon as he (or maybe she, I don’t remember) fell, so I could turn around and slowly putt back against the flow of traffic to retrieve him. That’s when I noticed a pontoon boat with a pilot looking the wrong way and headed directly toward our skier, who floated calmly in the water, buoyed by a floatation vest, and blissfully unaware of his pending doom.

Oddly enough, the driver of this pontoon boat was our new Lake Patrol officer, experiencing his first 4th of July on the lake, and busy yelling at some idiot who was doing something idiotic and not paying attention to the front of his own craft, which was about to become my skier’s personal Cuisinart. I yelled for my passengers to hang on tight then pushed the throttle down hard, aiming for the prow of the pontoon and blasting my boat’s horn. I noted an instant look of surprise on the face of Lake Patrol officer as he noticed a Ski Nautique bearing down on him in what would certainly result in a collision. In fact, I was prepared to sacrifice both my boat and his if it would prevent the imminent demise of my skier. My passengers were shouting and pointing at the skier directly in his path, and he quickly made the connection concerning why I was trying to run him over. His eyes opened wide in surprise, then he throttled back on his engine and steered safely away, while I slowed and circled back to pluck my fallen skier from the dangerous waters.

As we got the skier back into the boat, the Lake Patrol pulled alongside, apologizing for his near fatal mistake, and explaining that his attention was on the idiot he was yelling at, instead of paying attention to where he was going. I let him down easy and told him we all have to watch out for each other on days like this. For the rest of that summer, we got a wave and smile from the Lake Patrol every time we passed on the lake. After that experience, we decided to return the house and skip the rest of the skiing lessons. We all needed a bit of the “fifth on the Fourth” to calm our frayed nerves.

There are a few things wrong with Gary’s ditty about getting a fifth for the Fourth by the third. For starters, liquor bottles all switched to metric sizes by 1980, with the traditionally sized one-fifth of a U.S. Gallon, which gave the “fifth” its common name, shrinking to 750 milliliters. Also, we never bought a fifth of liquor for our holiday parties; instead we purchased the larger 1.5 liter size to ensure a reasonable supply. Then there was the year when the Fourth fell on a Monday. Gary was delighted to tell us that this year we need to buy our fifth for the Fourth by the second, since Wood’s didn’t have a Sunday license to sell it on the third.

Most of my memories of our July 4th parties are much less dramatic than the water skiing near-calamity. Gary had a plastic Elvis wig from Halloween that he put on with some funky sunglasses, then lip-synched Elvis songs playing on the stereo for the benefit of Dave and Dez’s little girls, using a borrowed hair brush as his microphone, as the girls squealed with delight. There was the time that I bought a huge fireworks display with dozen of tubes and a single fuse, which I set off at the end of my dock right before the Lake’s display started. It created a massive ball of thick smoke that drifted back toward shore, aiming directly for my new neighbors seated on their lawn chairs with their friends and family, in anticipation of the show. They had to temporarily relocate until the smoke dissipated. Also, for years after that, they scheduled out-of-town vacations during the week of the Fourth. Some folks just don’t how to have fun.

I told my mom that “In Gary’s favorite 4th of July saying, ‘if you need a fifth for the Fourth, you’ve got to get it by the third’” and she laughed, saying that she had never heard him say that. But her laughter was underpinned by the heartbreak that comes from losing two of your children before their time. She reached out to me (the last of her brood) for a hug, which I gladly provided, and she said that it sounded exactly like something Gary would have said. My brother had a playful, almost childlike quality that he maintained throughout his life, and endeared him to practically everyone who knew him. You might not want to discuss geopolitical policies with him, but if the subject was Steelers football, or how to shoot the biggest rooster tail while slalom skiing, or just what to do to make the day a little more fun, then Gary was your go-to guy. I miss him every day, even if I did sometimes want to shove a sock in his mouth when he said for the twentieth time that week: “If you need a fifth the Fourth, you better get it by the third.”

      

Gary at Lake Mohawk

A Hollow Man Reflects On 1984 and Our Brave New World

In the end, we gave up without a fight, although I certainly thought there should have been at least some shouting and perhaps a bit of minor bloodshed. Instead we quietly acquiesced, meekly retreating with our pocketbook in better shape, even if our souls took a fatal thrashing. Even my acidic wit failed me, delivering a single half-hearted glancing blow that the whole thing “…seemed a bit 1984-ish.” “Well, it’s just a little thing,” the agent countered, “and these things are already everywhere. You know, our cars used to have a computer in it. Now they are computers on wheels.” It was a line no doubt recited verbatim from his copy of the preparatory study guide provided by his own corporate overlords entitled “How to handle moral objections”. It still didn’t make me feel any better. I was selling out and deep down inside it hurt. Besides, I have a much greater respect for cars than to consider them computers on wheels. Also, I’ve never seen a computer go 100 mph (even when tossed out of a window).

The source of my moral outrage and anguish is a tiny little device that I will attach to the data port in my automobile. It will then be monitored via a satellite link-up by my insurance provider to see if I exceed the speed limit by a significant amount, or take corners too fast, or brake too quickly. Rational reflection on my part concedes that I really shouldn’t care. My days of going double the posted speed limit are far behind me (but if you put me behind the wheel of a new Porsche or a Mercedes S63 on the German autobahn, all bets are off). I’m almost positive the little econobox I drive couldn’t do so even if I wanted it to (at least at freeway speeds). I have a short commute to work, mostly down the main street in the small city where I live, and I pass the police station at the town square along the way. I plan my time sensibly and drive without significant haste. I’m fairly certain the folks who monitor such things for the insurance company will be bored senseless by my behavior behind the wheel. The end result of this whole thing that is currently causing me to reach for my antacids is that we will save a significant amount of money from our always escalating insurance bill. It’s always about money, isn’t it?

Now I have a vivid imagination, which I allow to wander freely. Suppose that when the yuletide holidays roll around again that I find myself seated at the bar of our local Quaker Steak and Lube, quaffing a pint or two of Great Lakes Christmas Ale in fellowship with my friends. If my monitored automobile sits for too long in the parking lot, will my insurance babysitters inform the local constabulary that I may be contemplating driving while tipsy? Or perhaps they might pass the information along to their health insurance division and warn them that I may be inside consuming one of those greasy stacks of onion rings that is served on a repurposed car antenna, risking clogged arteries, heart disease, or stroke.

You see, that’s the first problem with innocuous little devices that we allow to intrude into our lives for one simple purpose, like saving us money. I know that the reason the insurance company wants to attach it to my car isn’t really to save me money. The true purpose is to save them money. Because it’s always about money, isn’t it? The second problem is that such innocuous little devices, once attached, may take on other roles that we weren’t informed about, or may not approve of. Like monitoring my consumption of onion rings (which really isn’t even an issue, but that doesn’t mean it can’t piss me off) or just knowing where I go, or how long I stay.

So what should we do about innocuous little devices in our lives? The first thing I’m going to do is run up to the library in my as yet unmonitored vehicle and pick up a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 to reread. I kind of wonder if Orwell would be saying “I-told-you-so” about the way things are these days, or would he be saying “WTF!!! You let it happen?” Keep yourself informed, and if something is bothering you, speak up. Keep reading, expand your mind, and seek knowledge. We are letting the “smart devices” in our lives make us dumber, and the really smart people are laughing at us the whole time. And by the way, if the Thought Police are listening in, go screw yourselves.

 This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

From “The Hollow Men” by T S Eliot 

Olympics and Civilization

Clean water is necessary to sustain human life. One of the first things that any civilization must do is to make sure that its citizens have access to life’s basic necessities. In its effort to bring their brand of civilization to its ever-expanding empire, the ancient Romans constructed aqueducts, some of which still stand today. They understood the concept, and the world supposedly learned this lesson long ago. Therefore, I was initially appalled when I read a story about sportscaster Bob  

Costas getting an eye infection from washing his face in his Sochi hotel room while in town to cover the current Winter Olympics. I was ready to heap scorn upon the Russians, who have had years to prepare for this event, but were still working furiously after the deadline had come and gone. Perhaps their leader should put his shirt back on, gather a few civil engineers together, and solve this not-so-little dilemma. After all, these guys started the space race. Can’t they figure out how to provide clean water in a resort town?

After I had started writing about it, I paused for a little national introspection. Don’t get me wrong, despite how many times I get frustrated by my government or fellow citizens, I am still glad to live in a country where I can go to the sink and wash my face without getting pink eye. I’m thankful that the U.S. Congress once passed the Clean Water Act, back in the day when they actually did things like pass useful laws that benefit their constituents.  However, when I stopped to think about it, our track record isn’t exactly spotless these days. There was a recent chemical spill in a West Virginia river that sent nearby residents scrambling for bottled water because the stuff coming out of the faucet was poisoned. Contaminated water and coal fly ash are still leaking into a river in North Carolina. It’s never a good idea to hurl rocks from inside a glass house.

I would like to see some country, someday, open an Olympic Games when everything is in place and ready to go, but that’s probably never going to happen again. Perhaps it is just our need to over-complicate everything that makes this too difficult to accomplish in our modern age. The ancient Greeks just camped out during their Olympic Games way back when. But then again, they didn’t exactly invite the world to come over and play. It was hard enough getting Spartans to abide quietly alongside Athenians while ignoring the Corinthians. These days, we expect amenity-packed hotel rooms for our rest, and gourmet-quality restaurants to provide our sustenance. Anything less is unacceptable, and apparently subject to worldwide ridicule if the effort falls short.

Currently, the world seems to be holding its collective breath in anticipation of a terrorist strike from whatever ideologically inspired nutcase that sees the death of uninvolved innocents as an acceptable method of furthering their cause. Providing security at the Olympics is now a task of beyond Olympic-sized proportions. The games are now fraught with dangers from both within and without. Why do the athletes even bother taking the chance? Some actually compete because they would like to be considered the very best at what they do. There will be no significant recognition beyond the medal they receive in their fleeting moment of triumph. Others recognize that Olympic gold leads to that ever more desirable real gold, or at least money and fame. We root for our nation’s athletes in a nationalistic frenzy usually reserved for actual wars. But it’s easy to see that Olympic Games are a better alternative to real war, even if we’re able to provide air conditioned barracks and potable water to our battlefields and not our Olympic venues.

The Romans used their military might to conquer the Greeks, who had invented the concept of the Olympics. However, Roman civilization eventually peaked, then declined, then fell into the abyss known as the Dark Ages. Perhaps they lost focus of the important things like providing everyone with good drinking water, when the one-percenters of Roman leadership began to focus instead on orgies featuring luxuries like hummingbird tongue casseroles and entertainment featuring lions and Christians, where the cats held a distinct advantage and ensured a blood-soaked finale. There are lessons to be learned here, but we’re likely to miss them. We’ll be busy tweeting about the failure of Russian electronic signs and betting on the Jamaican Bobsled team.