[Mb-civic] Fixer-Upper Nation - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Fixer-Upper Nation

By Eugene Robinson
Friday, July 22, 2005; Page A23

This country is falling apart, and that's no figure of speech. We need 
an extreme makeover in concrete and steel, and we need it now.

This is a problem I can't blame on George W. Bush, for a change. Well, 
sure, I can blame him some, but he has to stand in line behind all the 
other presidents, members of Congress, governors, state legislators and 
mayors who have let the nation's plumbing rust, its wiring fray, its 
floor joists warp and its walkways crumble. If this were a house, the 
neighbors would have called the county inspectors long ago.


	


At first I thought it was just here, in the nation's capital and 
environs, where the infrastructure had deteriorated to what sometimes 
seems like Third World standards. In some cases, make that below Third 
World standards. In most of the developing countries I've visited, for 
example, they manage to keep the power on during a garden-variety 
thunderstorm. But here, in the most powerful city in the world -- a city 
of humid summers, where thunderstorms are to be expected all season long 
-- all it takes is a few flashes of lightning, and inevitably at least a 
few thousand households are left in the dark.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/21/AR2005072102195.html?nav=hcmodule

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