The terrorist steam pipe

A few days ago, I got a panicked call from my youngest son. During vacation from college, he is working as an intern at a law office in midtown Manhattan, trying to figure out if he wants to go to law school and figuring out how to live in the Big City on a little more than minimum wage. But his agitation was palpable over the phone: someone had bombed an office building about a block away from his work. Smoke was billowing and people were running and screaming.

It wasn’t a terrorist attack, of course. An ancient steam pipe had burst, resulting in one death and about 30 injured. It was a failure of our infrastructure, not of our foreign policy.

Or was it? Personally, I can’t separate the two things. It’s hard for me to explain this to people who cannot see beyond their latest ad-driven craving or their remote-controlled freedom from restraint, but I believe that our infrastructure is intimately tied to our failed foreign policy. After all is said and done, the two things are at least linked by money.

If we spend around two trillion dollars on fighting capricious wars, after all, doesn’t common sense tell us that we cannot spend that money on other things?

If we spend the vast majority of our discretionary budget on current and past wars, doesn’t it seem clear that there just might be a bit less money for things like public transportation, healthcare and education?

If we spend as much on wars as all the other countries of the world combined, doesn’t it make sense that eventually the potholes might not get fixed and that an occasional bridge would fall down?

This particular broken steam pipe might have nothing to do with our budget for infrastructure maintenance, of course. Things get old and things break, and sometimes people get hurt when they do. But I also know that the upkeep on our material support system is enormous, and there is a huge need to solve problems that haven’t even happened yet. Like global warming, which will take a staggering investment in new infrastructure if we are to live in a carbon-neutral world, avoid coastal flooding and the wrenching extinction of many species. We don’t have that money, of course. It is already being spent on things that explode and kill people and make our country enemies throughout the world. It seems like a pretty poor investment to me.

I don’t remember who said it, but years ago I heard someone talking about slavery. You can keep a boot on someone’s neck, he said, but that won’t give the master any more freedom than it gives the slave. After all, as soon as you remove your boot, you are in a great deal of danger. So you are trapped there as much as the slave is.

America’s boot is currently on the neck of the world. The world is angry about it. While it clearly is less painful to be the one on top rather than the one with the boot on your neck, we are trapped as well. Sooner or later, we will have to get up and attend to other needs. Needs that have been long neglected. I won’t be a pretty picture.