Jeff FeckeThis has not been a good month for Minnesota.

Two weeks ago, the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge collapsed, killing 13 and injuring dozens.  And this past weekend, at least six died in flooding in southeastern Minnesota.

The worst part? There are still 11 days left to go.

The twin calamities this month couldn’t be more different.  The 35W bridge disaster was man-made, but one that had an element of luck to it.  We now know that MnDOT was so concerned about the bridge they feared it may need to be condemned but held back from repairing it in an effort to seek out a cost-effective solution.

But luck spared us a worse disaster than we endured.  The unlucky 13 killed in the collapse of the bridge could have been many dozen more, had the school bus trapped on the bridge been just 20 or 30 feet further along in its travels.  Less than a second’s breadth separated us from something more horrific than even the horror we’ve had to endure.

The disaster in the southeast of the state was not man-made, but it had an element of luck, too.  Had the deluge that hit our state been spread out in two or three storms, there would have been no flood to speak of.  But the rains came too quickly for the ground to absorb them.

The damage in dollar value to our state is in the hundreds of millions of dollars — possibly more than a billion, when you factor the economic costs in.  But the psychic damage to our state is greater.

Read more…Minnesotans think of ourselves as a special lot.  We’re not like those folks down in Iowa, or over in the Dakotas.  And don’t get us started on the cheeseheads.  No, we’re a different sort of group, the kind who pull together and help out the neighbors when their crops fail and Tbuild strong roads and strong communities because that’s what you do.

But we’ve abandoned that in the last decade.  And now we are at the point where our state’s infrastructure is literally falling apart, and the best some of us can do is despair that taxes may have to be raised to pay for roads that don’t collapse on a sunny summer’s day.

Minnesota is not the state it once was.

That point was driven home to me this weekend.  Nobody and nothing can prevent tragedy; we may find that the disaster in the southeast had no easy prevention, that it was, as the insurance agents will put it, an “act of God.”  Perhaps there was no levee that could have protected against the flooding, no police that could have secured the area to prevent a car from chancing a water crossing it was not designed to make.  We may find this was just the sort of senseless, random tragedy our species has had to deal with for the past 200 millennia.  And before 35W collapsed, I would have felt sure of that.

But now I wonder: did we cut corners somewhere?  Could we have had state troopers out, but for the cost-effectiveness of it?  Could we have built levees, if the money had been there?  Could we have done something to prevent this, if only we’d been willing to make the sacrifices needed to do so?

Maybe not.  Probably not.  But I wouldn’t have even entertained the possibility a month ago.  Back then I believed that Minnesota was a state that did what it could to protect its residents, even if that wasn’t always cheap or easy.  I don’t believe that state exists anymore.  It’s gone — it turned out that kind of wishy-washy, liberal thinking was interfering with tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.  And why should we ask the best off among us to look out for the least among us?  Let the poor build their own bridges.

We owe each other something.  We owe our children something.  We owe our neighbors something.  No, the government can’t solve every problem, nor should it, but it can solve some problems better than private enterprise can — or “government” as an institution wouldn’t have survived Adam Smith.  There is every good reason to ask that government do things efficiently and carefully.  But it can’t do its job well if it lacks the resources to do it at all.  We, the people of Minnesota, have to ask ourselves if we hope for our state in 2025 to resemble Minnesota — or Alabama.  I know which one I’d choose, and why.  Do you?