A Government By the People, For the People?

The recent collapse of the Mississippi River Bridge is the last in a series of tragedies that point a crumbling and shoddy American infrastructure. It seems that for being a country of vast resources and technological innovation we are completely inept when it comes to providing our public with basic necessities such as roads, bridges, levees, health care, and emergency response. The failure of the levees in New Orleans was a gross failure of not American engineering, as we surely have the technology to build functional levees, but rather a failure of policy and intent. Providing safe infrastructure for our citizens has seemed to be on the backburner of the U.S. government’s priorities for decades now. The collapse of the Mississippi River Bridge is a sign that a long time policy of neglect and indifference has finally come home to roost, and that the policy of neglect has become so pervasive it is now affecting all Americans, not just primarily people of color, as was the case in New Orleans.

 

A recent article in the Washington Post explored the causes and effects of governmental neglect and incompetence. Reporter John McQuiad interviewed Former House speaker Newt Gingrich who explained the current predicament in public infrastructure and engineering as a “system-wide” government breakdown that includes health care, defense, intelligence and disaster response. It seems that whatever is pushing the engine of the American government has little to do with the needs of the American people or the needs of anybody who is not directly in the position to profit from the administrations crooked policies and practices.

 

There has been a tendency to call the United States sorely inadequate responses to disasters like Katrina “fumbled”, but our current situation is the result of something much more insidious. As McQuiad explains “Bush White House’s hostility toward the federal bureaucracy has been quite purposeful…[they have]…undermined the normal workings of agencies from the CIA to the Environmental Protection Agency, in part because they generate facts and opinions that conflict with political goals… the White House has also seeded the government with appointees chosen for loyalty and ideological affinity, not competence [and] all of this has taken a toll on agencies’ ability to process information, devise sound policies and communicate with the public.”

 

The collapse of our public infrastructure points to a governmental policy that is more invested in its own political goals and private financial gains than it is in the safety and wellbeing of their citizens. The death and destruction wrought by Katrina was completely avoidable, and it is shocking that such a blatant failure of engineering was constructed by the Army Corp of Engineers of the most powerful country in the world.  It leads us to ask where our priorities are, if they are not vested in the safety of our citizens or in the maintenance of our countries infrastructure and social services.

 

The collapse of the United States infrastructure is reflective of a government that is increasingly out of touch with the country it is governing. If the collapse of the Mississippi Bridge had occurred in France, or Italy, or England, or Spain, to name a few countries, there would have been mass protests against the party in power. If a structure of public mass transit collapses because of poor engineering, the blame rests upon the government. But in the United States there was not much of an uproar. The mainstream’s media, which has become increasingly compliant, focused on the bravery of those who helped victims and the sorrow of those who lost loved ones. There was little mention of things like anger, outrage, or protests against a government which would allow the American people to commute on structures they know are unsafe, not warn them, and then actively deny funding for repair. I would think the government is not acting for the people, because the “people” and the “government” have become so separate, they do react to the others needs or actions.

 

This leads us to the other issue of democratic participation. The disenfranchisement of people of color has proven to be an effective way to remove them from national politics. The removal of Black voters from the democratic process has worked to effectively silence their voices and needs. In order to have a country meet your demands, you must possess political weight, meaning that if the government does not meet your needs, you vote against them, and hence, cause the loss of their power. This is not the case in the United States. Because the government has disenfranchised many voters of color they have stripped them of their political weight, and in doing so the government has created a situation where they do not need to answer to the needs of the minority population and avoid taking responsibility for their “fumbled” policies.

 

It is important to draw the link between policy failures, broken infrastructure, and poor distribution of funding to voter disenfranchisement. There are reasons as to why the people most affected by the United States government’s dismal performance are also those who have been actively stripped of their voting power. If people of color were unimpeded voters, who voted in full numbers, then the United States government would be forced to change their policies or risk losing power. However, as things stand now, because of voter disenfranchisement and the silencing of voters of color, along with the compliant and servile media, the government has a carte-blanc to continue its inadequate, shortsighted, and profiteering ways.

 

What is so unfortunate is that we, as a nation, have allowed this policy to go on for so many decades. People of color have been suffering unduly under these policies of neglect and it has gone on unchecked for so many years that it has successfully eroded our nation’s foundation. What we can all learn as we watch American ingenuity crumble under a policy of neglect and corruption is that a government who neglects and disenfranchises one sector of its population is one that is neither truly democratic nor humanistic. The collapse of the Mississippi River Bridge should signal to the United States citizens that they have for too long condoned a policy of neglect.