August 1st will long be remembered in my city as the day the 35W bridge fell into the Mississippi River. (For me personally, August 1st is also memorable as the day I broke out in hives, thus discovering a drug allergy, but that's another story.) Someone I know predicted that this will become part of the identity of our community, similar to the Chicago fire.
Now everyone is asking why this happened, and how it can be prevented from happening again. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, more than 70,000 bridges in the US are structurally deficient, and fixing them would cost around $9.4 billion a year for the next 20 years. Maybe you're thinking, wow, that's a ton of money and we could never afford it. When I heard this, I thought, wow, only $9.4 billion? By my calculations, we are spending about 7 times that much every year in Iraq. So I guess we can afford whatever astronomical amount of money we want, if we make it a priority.*
Setting aside the argument (hysteria?) about to what extent we actually NEED to repair all these bridges, let's say we were going to do it. Here is my plan.
Resurrect the Civilian Conservation Corps and put them to work repairing bridges, redirecting a portion of the military budget and human resources there. Maybe provide some good jobs for folks from the ghettos and the reservations too.
When I presented my plan to Will, he said it will never happen, because it puts a government program in competition with private industry - not a popular idea in the USA these days. Then Will said I should run for Congress. (Now that will never happen!)
*It's also worth mentioning that twice as many US soldiers are dying in Iraq every week as those who were lost in the bridge accident.
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