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