McDonald: The collapse of US transportation
At the end of the year, I flew to Europe and back on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. On the flight out, in my section alone, two tray tables failed, one TV screen blacked out, a headphone port jammed, and the motors for three seats refused to turn on. On the flight back, the situation was even worse, and a crew of mechanics was called to make repairs so the passengers standing in the aisles could sit down. The plane took off an hour late. On both flights, the stewardess said, “Unfortunately, this has become quite common.”
I asked the mechanic who repaired my seat why this was happening. “We can’t get the parts” was his reply. “It’s been this way for nearly three years now.” This wouldn’t have surprised me if I had been flying from one third world country to another—Nairobi to Katmandu—but not from the United States to western Europe, and on an American-made plane.
Of course, this problem is entirely man-made, more specifically, government-made. By handcuffing businesses for two years, the US government destroyed the nation’s ability to manufacture parts and supplies for essential sectors of our economy, like air travel. And now, rather than work to solve the problem, government is simply making it worse by increasing the cost of labor through foolish cash giveaways and minimum wage increases, and increasing the cost of fuel by hobbling exploration, production, and distribution of oil and natural gas. My heating bill doubled this month, although I used the same amount of natural gas the month before. And last month’s bill was already double what it was the same month one year ago. Yesterday there were no eggs on the shelf at Trader Joe’s in Los Angeles. At Sprouts, there were three boxes left—each one priced at $12 a dozen. Eggs cost less than $2 a dozen before the government shutdown of businesses in spring 2020. These are not mistakes. They are intentional, planned, and thoughtfully executed stratagems to cause our nation to collapse.
Over Christmas, for the second time, a major wave of airline flight cancellations spread across the nation. This time, the entire network of Southwest flights—over 15,000—was taken down just as Americans prepared to travel to see their families for the holiday. Millions of people were left stranded for days in the middle of winter with no information and no hope for a rapid solution. Southwest blamed the collapse on a software issue.
Last week the entire commercial air transportation system was shut down, as the FAA grounded all flights for the first time since the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attacks. Once again, a software issue was reported to be the cause. Despite this being a once-in-a-generation event, the shutdown barely registered on the evening news. Have Americans simply grown accustomed to the new third-world status of their home country, or have news organizations decided not to report on major infrastructure failures to provide cover for the government program of destruction?
Tucker Carlson proposed that the increased frequency of transportation failures is due to cyberterrorism. Possibly. I think he’s giving the terrorists too much credit, though. The evidence that our own government is behind every one of our current national catastrophes is overwhelming. An advisory committee for the city of San Francisco just recommended paying every black resident there $5 million for “reparations.” Why not $100 million? And where will this lottery award funding come from? The advisory committee did not answer that question. The goal, as always, is not to solve a problem but rather to create a new one. Ronald Reagan had this realization decades ago, when he observed that “government is not a solution to our problem…government is the problem.”
Government is certainly the cause of the collapse of our national transportation systems. Here I highlight air travel, but this is also happening to local transport as well: trains, subways, buses. Simply driving a car has become more difficult—the cost of purchase, maintenance, and operation has skyrocketed. The roads are in disrepair. The car itself is under threat of a ban as the gasoline-powered engine is due to be outlawed in California and other states in less than 10 years. When I picked up my car from the body shop last month after a week of repairs, the manager told me I was lucky. “I have a brand-new Ford with only 100 miles on it that’s been sitting here for four months—we can’t get the parts for it.” No government that truly wants its citizens to thrive makes it harder to travel or transport goods. A government that wants its citizens to suffer does that.
Mark McDonald, M.D.
Psychiatrist and author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis and Freedom From Fear: A 12 Step Guide to Personal and National Recovery
