Let me start with this: Overhead power lines are not only ugly, they’re vulnerable to collapse in storms. Ten years ago, after Hurricane Sandy caused power outages across a large swath of the country, a question appeared in this space: Why not bury power lines? Why not put them out of harm’s way and out of sight?
Take a minute to look at it and the system seems archaic — heavy black wires strung from pole to pole along miles and miles of roads, in rural and suburban areas as well as city neighborhoods.
But the response to the question was what you’d expect: In Maryland at the time, BGE estimated that burying power lines would cost $1 million a mile. The conversation pretty much ended there.
So we live with a system that hearkens to the age of the telegraph, abiding its aesthetically detrimental effect and its costly vulnerability as storms become more extreme with climate change.
Before I go further, let me say that, while a pet peeve of mine, aboveground power lines do not constitute the most pressing issue of our times. Old water mains and Baltimore’s vacant houses are probably better examples of what I’m getting at. They’re all symbolic of an aggravating truth: America is sagging at middle age and, though we’re full of brains and wealth, we don’t seem to muster the brains and wealth to fix things in big, transformative and sustainable ways.
This is not a popular thing to say. Most of us like to hear optimistic thoughts — America is an exceptional country, leader of the free world, land of endless possibilities. We hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
It is not widely accepted — in some quarters, denied outright — that the country has fallen behind in so many ways that big, transformational investment is needed to get us back on track toward the kind of steady progress generations had accepted as the American way.
Life is good for many, but not so for millions who’ve struggled for years, and if you didn’t know that before the pandemic, you surely must now.
We’ve experienced rising income inequality and the concentration of obscene wealth for four decades, as if it’s some natural phenomenon and not made-made. We have billionaires shamelessly building spaceships for themselves while charities have to beg for money to serve people who struggle to stay housed and fed. The Washington Post recently established that there are 745 billionaires in the country with “cumulative wealth [that] has grown by an estimated 70 percent since the beginning of the pandemic. … Together, those 745 billionaires are now worth more than the bottom 60 percent of American households combined.”
The nation’s tiresome political polarization has been especially costly; because of it, we’re missing opportunities to do big things that need to be done to ensure a better future for our children and grandchildren — on the climate front, in particular.
Many days and weeks, we waste time on foolish arguments, with Republicans in Congress finding every reason to say no to just about everything except tax cuts for billionaires, millionaires and corporations.
They fought against expanding health care access to 50 million Americans, many of them their own constituents.
Republicans have mostly stopped ridiculing warnings about climate change, but they are still unwilling to do much about it.
Why bother being in government if you’re not going to do anything that gets the country to a better place?
Life expectancy in America has fallen. Gun violence is up at record levels, even in places like Des Moines and Albuquerque that suddenly became, against their history, “no country for old men.”
We allowed more guns to get into easy circulation even as the country became more violent. What did we think was going to happen?
The opioid epidemic continues to take a terrible toll across the nation. We built prisons when we should have built hospitals for drug treatment.
We couldn’t even get agreement on infrastructure spending — for highways, bridges, water systems — until a few months ago, despite clear evidence that the country needed big investment to keep up with its growth.
The current inflationary cycle stings with reality — stuff costs more than we thought, and that’s relevant to my point. If you fall behind on repairs to your house, the bill to catch up — to really get your house in order and prepared for any storm — is going to be large, even shocking.
Coming out of the pandemic, with supply chains stressed and demand for goods high, inflation should not surprise any of us. Neither should we be shocked at the sticker price for getting the nation up to speed — on infrastructure, on wages, on food, on child care, on education, health care and public safety. President Joe Biden’s "Build Back Better" agenda would have addressed a lot of overdue needs, but too many millionaires who sit in the U.S. Senate refused to support it.
Fortunately, not everyone suffers from America’s long bout of shortsightedness.
The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future makes a long-term investment in education funding ($3.8 billion over the next decade) to reform the system and make the students who come out of our schools among the best prepared in the world. That’s a great goal to support, to be proud of, based on a carefully crafted plan that addresses this wealthy state’s shortcomings while pushing the good to be great.
Shouldn’t that be the American way?
