Stage two: anger

The Kübler-Ross model of grief says that there are five stages for those grieving— denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I think, as a city, we are well into stage two, and that includes me. Frankly, I’m choking on outrage at the moment: when I think about the fallen bridge and how this possibly could have happened, bile rises to my throat like acid. This is a rich country. We spend hundreds of billions on this seemingly endless war, but fail to ensure that all Americans have access to health care and a decent education. We send our young men and women—especially low-income men and women with few other options— to war and fail to treat them fairly and decently when they finally come home. Freedom isn’t the only thing that isn’t free (not that freedom is gained by bombs and guns to begin with). Education isn’t free. Health care isn’t free. Treating veterans decently isn’t free. Infrastructure isn’t free.

My expectations are not all that high. I don’t expect affordable health care here; I don’t expect our inner city schools to be funded adequately. I really, really wish those things were different, but I don’t expect them to be. I did expect, however, that when my fellow Twin Citians and I drove over a bridge, that bridge would hold up every single time. The people that died or were injured didn’t willingly gamble their lives when they attempted to cross the Mississippi. That disbelief that echoed around the world this week? I share it entirely.

Certain politicians are claiming that it isn’t helpful to point fingers, but you know what? They don’t get to say that, in my book. They don’t have the right to be in charge of our resources and not have fingers pointed in their direction when things go horribly wrong under their leadership. The people of this fine city and state (and country) will darn well point fingers, loudly and insistently, until we have some decent answers and until we have a plan in place that will ensure that this never, ever happens again. It’s going to cost money, and for once it’s the politicians who will claim to want to save us a buck who are going to leave a bad taste in our mouths. I imagine that those who hail from New Orleans probably have a pretty good idea how we feel. It seems that the people and institutions who may turn out to have had a hand in failing to prevent this tragedy would like for us to move neatly past the anger and right onto acceptance, and in the process to accept their tidy spin on how this happened. No-one I know here is ready to do that.

Most of the victims went to the hospital where I work, and some are still there. We all did what we could to help this week, and the atmosphere was one of quiet resolution, working together to help people heal and get their lives back. There were blessedly few deaths in the end – far fewer than initially expected. There were many heroes that day, including our own Meag*an, who along with her boyfriend, knowingly put her life at risk to help rescue severely injured people just after the collapse. What people who don’t live here may not entirely understand is that the whole city pretty much feels like it’s cheated death. Almost all of us crossed that bridge regularly – 140,000 a day is almost half the population of Minneapolis, and everywhere I go I hear stories of those who were just ahead of or just behind the tragedy. It could have been almost any of us, and yet it wasn’t. For many of is, it will be a long time before we can drive across the Mississippi River without remembering what was and what could have been.

On Saturday, I drove the boys to the Children’s Muse*m in St. Paul. For a weekend morning, traffic was heavy on 94, mostly due to the reroute. As we slowly crossed the river on yet another highway bridge, my boys singing Old MacDonald in the back like any other day, I couldn’t help but imagine the accident, the horrible end to an ordinary stop-and-go commute, a bridge suddenly giving way underneath us.

It was the word accident that most stuck in my mind, though, even more than the terrible images. Bridges don’t just fall down, at least they didn't used to. Whatever the exact cause, this was almost certainly preventable. If we don’t take proper care of our basic infrastructure, if we don’t dare spend the money to do it properly and thoroughly, this will probably happen again. This was a horrible accident, but it was also an opportunity to get some very basic things right. If we don’t, then the now predictable result cannot fairly be called accidental.