Infrastructure is more than highways and bridges anymore. In today’s world, it includes energy and water utilities, internet and cell phone service, health care, education, and the environment. It’s more complex and interrelated than it used to be.
Also, it’s more vulnerable to internal neglect as well as external attacks like the Texas power grid failure and the Colonial Pipeline ransom, respectively. Neglect of the former caused deaths and unnecessary hardship for Texas citizens. Tactical attacks on the latter caused inconvenience to East Coast states but also identified vulnerabilities to national security, to ourselves as well as those intending us harm.
These warning signs are obvious, or should be, to all elected representatives. Denial by Republicans, en masse, that there is a problem, or if there is then we should pay as little attention to it as possible to resolve it, is simply myopic. Even more so, it’s dangerous because propagating that thinking interferes with preventing the consequences we’ll inevitably have to solve in the near future at much greater cost, both human and financial. With Republican denial, the hazards have only increased in duration and intensity and I wonder if, as a country, we can survive the lack of fiscal morality that’s been displayed so far.
So-called financial conservatives are failing to make decisions in the best interest of the general public to mitigate the risks that are expected to be fulfilled in the future. Nothing we deal with today lasts forever. Everything we know and have contact with will wear out, erode, fracture, break down, stop working, and just die. The only thing we can do is to take care of it long enough so we don’t become its victims. If we can’t, or won’t, take care of infrastructure, replace it with something better. Somehow, the wealthy are able to get better service from Republican politicians than the rest of us. Instead, we the people are left behind to clean up after the roads buckle from heat and water resources get plagued with “colorful” algae blooms (if there’ll be any water available at all).
The Republican policy to minimize the risk while remaining reluctant to protect citizens is disturbing. Supporting a platform to cause self-harm is beyond comprehension. The addiction to short term gains blinds these elected “representatives” and their supporters to the magnitude of the losses that will need to be repaid. The most recent tragedy with the condominium collapse in Surfside, Florida is just another example of ignoring the consequences in favor of inaction.
How many catastrophes will it take before we all realize that policies need to be in place to make the best use of resources before disaster strikes? A simple analogy comes to mind: Do you make a habit of changing the oil in your car before or after the engine blows up? If infrastructure had a dashboard with a warning light, would we be ignoring it then too? As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what’s happening.
Stacy Briley
Zion Crossroads
This letter was previously published in the latest edition of the Central Virginian newspaper and is reprinted here with the author’s permission.