The Kids Are Alright

Thank you to everyone who e-mailed, texted, and called Emily and me last night. We are okay and so far as I know, everyone we know is okay. A professor from Emily's Epidemiology department was on the bridge when it crumbled, but was able to walk away from her car safely.

Any death from this bridge's collapse is one too many. But I am amazed at the number of people who have survived this. That being, like all of us, I am haunted by stories of people plunging into the water. Or by the divers taking down license plates of cars below the river. I lack the emotional intelligence to imagine what it is like to be a family member of one of the missing.

I haven't had a chance get near the scene of the collapse. Emily has had the opportunity but has passed. She started her new job a the University of Minnesota yesterday, and could have walked over. But she told be she didn't want to see it. It all sounded too horrible.

Intellectualizing what has happened has been a very short process for me. I get stuck on one question and can't move on: how the hell did this happen? You know the old bit: we put a man on the moon, but we can't time our traffic lights downtown, or whatever. Well, we put a man on the moon about the same time this bridge was built, but forty years later, we couldn't see the warning signs that this bridge could collapse?

I don't know if anyone is to blame. Maybe it was a fluke occurence that we will learn from, like the wind shears that brought down the Delta jumbo jet in Dallas in 1985.

And at this point I am not interested in assessing blame. But that being said, I am amazed that in the 21st century, with all our technology and oversight, we didn't see this coming.

In the meantime, outside of the bipartisan bickering and passing of the buck that is sure to happen in the coming months, I have no idea what my adopted city will be like, and how we will respond emotionally and logistically. But for now, I have been impressed by the compassion and support we have shown for one another.

Here is a link by a columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Nick Coleman. There are nuances to the article that I disagree with. Like how Coleman spends a few paragraphs hinting that Governor Pawlenty's budget vetoes are somehow responsible for the bridge's collapse, but then saying, "but you know all politicians are too blame." That is cowardly. Either have the cajones to call the governor out or don't.

And in addition, my understanding is, if you look at the budgets he vetoed, none of them had money devoted to reparing this bridge. But I do agree that there is a culture of neglecting infrastructure, as it eats up taxpayer dollars, that we need to overcome.

I think Coleman's column would have been stronger if he left Pawlenty alone for once, and stuck to that bigger point. We have been neglecting and taking for granted our infrastructure for too long. I lost trust in my government from this tragedy. And more importantly we lost lives. And what if it was preventable? What if, as a society, each and everyone of us (not just our politicians) placed an emphasis in investing in our infrastructure. And that is why Coleman's column struck a chord with me.