Not even an interstate bridge collapse in Minneapolis (2007) could shake Americans out of their stupor about the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Wokeness may get people hot under the collar but “infrastructure week” became a running joke under a president who claimed to build things. Mentioning the persistent lack of rural broadband got a leader I consulted recently hot under his collar. Candidates better not come around here dropping that buzzword again without actual plans for making it happen, he said.
We can land a robotic rover on Mars, but a short drive from Houston’s Johnson Space Center a poor neighborhood had tainted water flowing from its taps. Elsewhere across Texas, Arctic cold had knocked out power to millions and broken water pipes.
In a wide-ranging report, the Washington Post examines how much America’s cutting-edge self-image and its reality diverge:
Historic breakthroughs in science, medicine and technology coexist intimately — and uneasily — alongside monumental failures of infrastructure, public health and equitable access to basic human needs.
America can put a rover on Mars, but it can’t keep the lights on and water running in the city that birthed the modern space program. It can develop vaccines, in record time, to combat a world-altering illness, but suffers one of the developed world’s highest death rates due to lack of prevention and care. It spins out endless entertainment to keep millions preoccupied during lockdown — and keep tech shares riding high on Wall Street — but leaves kids disconnected from the access they need to do their schoolwork.
Just south of California’s Silicon Valley last summer, two schoolgirls sat in a Taco Bell parking lot borrowing its Wi-Fi to do their homework. The photo went viral. But demand for remedying the situation?
The disparities reflect a multitude of factors, experts say, but primarily stem from a few big ones: Compared with other well-to-do nations, the United States has tended to prioritize private wealth over public resources, individualism over equity and the shiny new thing over the dull but necessary task of maintaining its infrastructure, much of which is fast becoming a 20th century relic.
“Let’s face it, we don’t have ribbon cuttings when we replace a pipe. Only when there’s a brand new bridge,” said Joseph Kane, an associate fellow at the Brookings Institution. “That’s the American fascination with bigger and better.”
Politicians have their pictures made at the launching of gleaming, new Navy ships that then lack the supplies to make them fully operational. No one elbows for photos in front of crates of spare parts and ammunition. That problem dates at least from the Reagan administration.
From internet access to health care, distribution is inequitable and quality as well, even around the richest zip codes. The myth that America treats everyone equally regardless of race, color, or creed is as decrepit as the country’s bridges.
Lark Jones lives in the wealthy Washington, D.C. metro region close to the tech corridor where scientists developed the technology behind the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Covid vaccines. About the time of the announcement, people all around her fell ill with the disease. Her 72-year-old mother survived 2-1/2 weeks in intensive care but with kidney damage that will leave her needing dialysis to stay alive.
A resident of Northeast D.C., Jones lost her job as a home health aide in 2017 and, with it, her job-provided insurance. She found new work, in the form of two part-time jobs for minimum wage. But part-time work — even when it amounts to 17-hour workdays with just one day off a week — doesn’t necessarily provide health insurance. And Jones, who requires regular treatment and medication for diabetes and high blood pressure, can’t afford to buy her own.
In her two part-time jobs — as a youth counselor and as a program assistant at a D.C. homeless shelter — she is considered an essential worker. She’s one of the people who continued to go to work, even as others stayed home and as friends and family began to fall ill. The essential worker designation ultimately made her eligible for a vaccine; this month she received her second dose.
But the irony of it all feels outrageous when she thinks about it. There was never any hazard pay, nor any protection should she get sick.
Democrats began work last week on a long-overdue infrastructure bill. President Biden campaigned on a $2 trillion infrastructure plan he pledged would create a “modern, sustainable infrastructure and an equitable clean energy future.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, a state built atop massive public works projects, last week called infrastructure one of her “favorite subjects.” But for her that means more than the shiny, high-visibility projects:
“It’s not just roads and bridges, mass transit and high-speed rail, it’s also about water systems,” she said. “Some of the water systems we have are over 100 years old.”
And our health system still leaves many Americans behind both in poorer, browner urban neighborhoods and in poorer, whiter rural ones. Making sure no one gets left behind will bridge divides and boost public support even if Biden cannot find it among Republicans in Congress deaf to it. Succeeding in delivering basics all Americans need could make Biden “the most transformative president since FDR.”