Not to decide is to decide.
Harvey Cox
Interstate 10 is a transcontinental highway running from Jacksonville, Florida, to Santa Monica, California. Thousands of trucks are on this road 24 hours a day, dominating the highway during the nighttime hours. Sometimes the 18-wheelers are packed so tightly that they appear to be a long, endless convoy.
Along this 2,400-mile stretch of road, there is one major bottleneck: the Horace Wilkinson Bridge that spans the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge. Every day, a traffic jam stretches for two miles or longer. I used to cross the bridge daily, and it often took me half an hour to creep over the Wilkinson bridge.
The need for a new bridge to route transcontinental traffic around downtown Baton Rouge has been apparent for over 30 years. And yet that bridge has never been built. Indeed, as of this week, the site has not been selected, and state officials estimate that the bridge won't be constructed for another nine years.
Surely, the United States, the wealthiest society in the history of humankind, can get the job done faster. Using nineteenth-century technology, New York City took just 14 years to construct the Brooklyn Bridge. The Russians completed the Kerch Strait Bridge, the longest bridge in Europe, in only two years.
The Americans are no longer a people who can get things done quickly and efficiently. Planning for the "Big Dig," a project to improve traffic flow in Boston, began in 1982, and the project wasn't finished until 2007.
California voters approved the construction of a high-speed rail line connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2008, to be completed by 2020. Yet the rail line is still not finished.
Americans have become a people who can't make decisions. We cannot even determine whether boys should compete against girls in varsity sports. The Supreme Court will decide that question for us in the coming months.
To borrow a phrase from the movie Lawrence of Arabia, Americans have become "a little people, a silly people--greedy, barbarous, and cruel." Our adversaries--Russia, China, and radical Islamism--know this about us. If we don't toughen up, our enemies will one day bring us down.
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| The Kerch Bridge, Photo credit: The Moscow Times |