In article . net,
"Dudley Henriques" dhenriques@noware .net wrote:

You may rest assured that when this thing has run it's course and everything
that has made up this horrible experience has been tallied up and the
country moves on, life in the United States will have experienced a paradigm
shift, and life as we have known it in our country will never be quite the
same again.

I'd hope that part of this paradigm shift would be a real, genuine
recognition that we've got to continuously maintain, repair, upgrade,
keep in solid working condition our civic and civil infrastructure, both
our physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, dams, levees, pumps, power
and communications systems, whatever) *and* our human and governmental
infrastructures (people, skills, tools, training, supplies, backups).

We need to maintain these civil infrastructures over the long term just
as well as the vast majority of the people on this group, for example,
will maintain their own airplanes and their personal flying skills, and
just as well as many other people -- but unfortunately not all -- try to
maintain their houses and cars and neighborhoods and schools.

But I don't think it will happen. To be political, here -- since
maintenance of civil infrastructure is at base always a political
decision -- the loonies of the Left won't do it because they're too
diverted by varying combinations of political correctness, inability to
really face hard problems and hard decisions, and New Age nuttiness; and
the nutcases on the Right won't do it because they're too caught up in
their irrational anti-tax and "market forces" ideologies (and as a side
issue, too many of them are able to buffer themselves from disasters or
just from the deterioration of the society around them, and so have
little need or motivation to support its maintenance).