Monday, August 4, 2008

Obama's Sense of America: Responsibility, Infrastructure leverage Initiative

HotCurry
Oregon’s Infrastructure, America’s Infrastructure decay on display along Coastal US 101. If you want only one reason to vote for Obama, take his position on renewing our emphasis for responsibility for government and people to sustain a working and effective infrastructure. It’s a dilly and it will pay off. Ask the Greatest Generation. Their fathers from the Depression Generation built one heck of an infrastructure for them to become the greatest generation.

We can’t just sit on our deck and see this one. So We'll guide you to us. If you want to get to Port Orford Oregon you need to drive up US 101 from Crescent City or down US 101 from Coos Bay. In either case you’ll need pretty good suspension, a lot of patience, and an adventurer’s spirit to make the trip. South of Port Orford, our little place in Oregon Coastal Heaven, you’ll


experience several ‘road below grade’ events. Road below grade is a euphemism for “Oops the road slide down into the ocean and we tried to fix it”. These happen every year and Port Orford can’t be reached from the south for about two weeks each winter.


From the north, you’ll have your adventures in the summer, or, as we fondly call it ‘Flagging Season’. During the summer when storms aren’t wrecking havoc, dropping trees across the highways, washing out drainage underpasses, or just destroying roadways with weather, work crews stop summer traffic with flaggers as they bring in new macadam, rocks, gravel, sand, and other fix-its to make the roads worthy of travel for the next few months.

We're telling you this because roads are the ONLY way you can get to Port Orford.


We'd mention sea routes if you are adventurous enough to brave 30 knot northerly gales in summer and 120 knot south winds in the winter and if you are willing to get there in boats that are thirty years old and via harbors that are not dredged but now and then. There is no rail, no air routes that come to Port Orford, or, to most any towns you can to mention along the Oregon coast. Just this last month Coos Bay learned that several air carriers are dropping service there and their new terminal facility is now a fading dream. Last year the local Rail Barron, that’s what they are since they can start and stop service whenever they want, stopped service to Coos Bay. These crooks are presently holding up local, state, and federal government for costs to repair their lines into and out of Coos Bay from Eugene as the price for continued service.

Hey, we haven’t even begun to talk about city streets, county roads, government infrastructure such as VA and Medicaid facilities and support, Social Services, even food bank distribution, and school 19th century communication services. Veterans get little service along the coast. In fact the only VA hospitals are located along I 5. Easter Oregon gets the shaft too. If you think schools are suffering in cities, you’d better recalibrate. Imagine bus routes of 40 miles that have to be navigated each day twice here in Porford for about 80% of our student populations. You know that Information network for the 21st Century Clinton promoted in the ‘90s. We got our first school linked up to a wireless, not fiber, system just this spring, thank you very much.

You want grain, cattle, wool, cranberries, blueberries, milk and cheese? Get ready to pay more because from where you get this stuff the routes aren’t being maintained and gas is going up, up, up. Bread and cereal aren’t just going up because some are making profit from biofuels, these prices are going up because roads are decaying and poorly designed. they're going up because rail service is being constrained to 'profitable' routes, air travel likewise, and we've lost our shipbuilding and transporting industry long ago. heck, we can't even win the Americ'a Cup any more we've fallen so far behind.

Now we understand that infrastructure is a problem across America. It just isn’t here in Port Orford. But, in Port Orford you’ll get a rubber meets the road view of it. We’ve mentioned as a recurring theme in our post stream that infrastructure, government responsibility and our future depend on citizens thinking a bit beyond the idea that taxes are their money and that it only take American initiative to succeed. We want you to look around and see what is happening to cities and to businesses in our industrial centers.

The most important thing you’re going to find is that we’ve not been paying attention to our infrastructure. We’ve not taken our responsibility to work together to keep it in good working order. The results are now like those proverbial Chickens, coming home to roost in lost employment, lost technological edge, lost leadership in architecture, second rate industrial methodology, communications, transportation, productivity infrastructural base.

But what took place once in Ameica can take place again. We’re proud to say that we’re the son of a farm boy who worked for the CCC and then dedicated his productive life to Bonneville’s building of an electrical grid, a flood control system, and an irrigation system that fruited the inland empire. Now that’s dedication to infrastructure. We understand and we are going to vote for Barack Obama the person who understands that responsibility, commitment to our society, sustaining an infrastructure, are necessary to leverage intitiative. These, together, are keys to American greatness.

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