Not a lack of money but a lack of will
Ireland – conservative, Catholic Ireland – tomorrow may well become the first nation to approve same-sex marriage by a vote of its people.
Marriage between people of the same sex is legal in 17 other countries, but only by acts of their legislatures or courts. Approving the practice by referendum – and polls indicate passage will be by a large margin – exemplifies just how much change has swept across the Emerald Isle in a generation. Just 20 years ago, homosexuality was a criminal act there and divorce was illegal.
We have experienced just as much social change on this side of the Atlantic. Same-sex marriage, abhorrent to much of our population just a decade ago, is now widely accepted and could become legal in all 50 states should the Supreme Court decide so later this year.
But as sweeping as this movement has been, change in other important aspects of life has been slow or dormant. The deteriorating infrastructure in the United States is but one example. As reported in Wednesday’s edition of this newspaper, the transportation research group TRIP has found that rural transportation in the United States is in critical need of improvement to address deficient roads and bridges that result in high crash rates. The high volume of traffic on our highways makes keeping up with repairs and reconstruction nearly impossible, yet so little attention is paid to solutions for lowering that traffic volume: in other words, mass transportation.
The sorry excuse for the poor condition of roads and rails is that we lack the money to fix and improve them. The truth is that we have the money; we’re just unwilling to spend it for this purpose.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell has been making the news lately, slamming Congress for its inability to pass a long-term transportation funding bill. The last one expired in 2012. He has been calling members “outright cowards” for failing to raise the federal gasoline tax since 1993. He is right that making any significant improvement in our infrastructure will require a tax increase, and not a small one. Our elected representatives, however, are convinced that the public would much prefer driving over rutted and crumbling roads and teetering bridges than pay 10 cents more for a gallon of gasoline.
Our nation not only lacks a plan for transportation improvement, we have no energy policy. And although we have made some strides in health care, we still have no plan to ensure affordable care for every American.
Not just our politicians but our citizens as well have a fatalistic attitude about real change. We hear there’s no use in considering fixing bridges, reconstructing highways, laying rails for high speed trains and urban and suburban transportation routes because they are too difficult and expensive. We’ll keep fouling our atmosphere by burning oil and coal because it’s just too expensive and impractical to produce electricity and fuel our cars by cleaner means.
Locally, we react to ideas like building a rail connection from Pittsburgh International Airport to the city, or extending the T line south to Washington as absurd fantasies.
We once were a people powered by optimism whose motto was “Yes We Can.” Now we are a nation that believes No We Can’t and asks: Why bother?