Saturday, August 16, 2003
NOTE: THIS IS ONLY A ROUGH SKETCH OF MY POST. I HAVE TO CLEAN IT UP AND ADD LINKS. PLEASE COME BACK.
More about the blackout a little later...
There were really only two things about the blackout that surprised me. 1. How little of anything is running on reliable power generation in this country. NYC went black. They had to pull people off of subways through holes in the ground. There was no drinkable water in affected areas in Ohio because pumping stations went down as soon as the outage hit. You have got to be kidding me! Gas pumps went dry in Detriot and Michigan declared a state of emergency. The East Coast literally ground to a halt. Generators are not new technology. This all happened in less than 24 hours.
We "save" money by holding out on important proactive measures and then we demonstrate that we're on top of the situation by overcompensating after the fact with unjustifiable levels of redundancy that cost a ton of money and do nothing but introduce inefficiencies which in turn drives up day to day operating costs.
The USPS was fine until someone actually started sending powdered anthrax through the mail. Are you telling me that for well over 200 years it never occurred to anyone that somone might think of putting something other than an letter in an envelope? And then it happens and we obsess about it, spend money that we don't have to overcorrect the problem, change the rules to make the system less effective/less efficient regardless of any other factors like the fact that the Postal Service is in shit shape, runs at an operating loss, is being managed into irrelevance, faces new competition, raises the price of stamps as a way to fund initiatives to raise the price of stamps.
The same goes for airport security (people have been hijacking planes for as long as there have been planes to hijack) apparently that was all just fun and games until on Sept 11 someone got hurt. The fact that people resorted to boxcutters to hijack planes is an indication that airport security was working well in my opinion. The problem isn't airport security it's that this fucked up culture of ours has people so unsure of themselves, their rights, responsibilities and any kind of boundries that we're all too willing to blindly follow the direction of anyone who is put in a positionof leadership whether a 150 lb terrorist or an incompetent, out of control manager at work.
There are a thousand examples of this... a lack of preparation leading to a problem and then overcompensation. This is a receipe for a recession and now we have the department of homeland security, the largest government agency EVER, mail costs more and moves more slowly and is not necessarily more secure than it was before (it's certainly easier to identify holes now than it was before), the airline industry is still a disaster waiting to happen even after a 5+ billion dollar bail out and the war against terrorism and now the crisis with the power grid. Let me give you a preview of some other pending crises in this country: the medical system, the educational system, the political system, the legal system, public works, transportation, data infrastructure, manufacturing. We're just screwed. And because we're not anticipating any of it we wait for a disaster to dictate when we turn our attention to any one of them or all of them. I can't remember do we have the money to rebuild the power grid? Of course we don't which is why deregulation and privatization were appealing in the first place. Do you mean to tell me that a bunch of entities all engaged in unhealthy competition with one another can't cooperate... my goodness that's awful. Of course it's awful and it's the world we live in. And all of you stupid mother fucking middle/lower middle/poor republicans running around. This is why you don't want small government. I'd like more money too but I can't take a 300 check from the government and rebuild my little corner of the power grid. The power grid doesn't work that way and neither does anything else for that matter. I don't have enough money to improve the public school system and it's not good enough for me to just opt for a private school for my kids because private school can't keep my kid from getting shot in the head by some public school kid with no options. I can't fight terrorism, defend the country, build and maintain the roads... and I don't have enough money to insulate myself from any of these issues and neither do you. Together we do and that's called government. Being in favor of small government means being in favor of the widening gap between the haves and the have not, fewer options for your kids, and less opportunity for yourself. Smaller government means more crises and less preparedness it means less stability.
I'll have to finish this up later.
By the way I understand that government doesn't work but the solution isn't to ignore it to death (if you were to successfully ignore it to death what would you have left?) and the solution isn't ineffective protest. Here's a start... boycott Arnold Schwarzenegger movies (quietly) and support professional politicians not these pop culture freaks who are out to pad their legacy at the expense of your chidren's futures (don't worry about their kids, they'll be just fine). In this country we all need opportunity and all any of us wants is a fair shot at happiness (remember) and all of us need help to do that. It takes money to make money. I don't have enough but if we all pooled our money... everyone in the country... we could do great things, accomplish all of our collective goals and in turn focus on whatever is important to us individually. That's called government stupid.
Now send me 2 dollars for the civics lession and go apologize to someone you love for being so stupid and helping to destroy the country.
12:03:14 PM 
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