Editorial 2.10, October 2000, by Deirdre Helfferich A Deep, Deep Hole Let me tell you a story about modern times: Back in the days before they invented things like culverts and asphalt, I lived on top of Ester Dome, and the main road was built from silt and tire-chomping boulders—still is, come to think of it. I remember one morning, as we were driving down the hill, how slippery the road was and how gray the sky. It had been raining a lot. I was a tyke and some parent or other was driving, but I still recall vividly when we came around the second-to-last curve before the bottom: in front of us, spreading across more than half the road, was a gigantic hole in which a car was thoroughly stuck. It was pointing nose-down, like some giant puppy digging about in a pit looking for a bone. Unlike a puppy, however, that car was quite possibly never going to get out. Its rear wheels were in the hole too, and insofar as an inanimate object can express emotion, it looked quite unhappy. The water running in the ditch had dug a channel right under the road, but the silt in the surface, being somewhat sticky, had hung on, giving the deceptive appearance of a fully-supported road surface. That poor driver hadn’t a clue that the earth was going to fall out beneath him until he was right on top of the abyss. DOT has finally, after months and months, put up the not-very-illuminating, diamond-shaped, flag-decorated warning signs, reading PAVEMENT DAMAGE, on the Parks by our local water-filled abyss. Everybody except the truckers seemed to notice long ago that yes, the road was falling down from underneath us, and that any day now the highway would tumble into the pit left by that bedraggled (and, it proved, decidedly un-neighborly) Yellow Belly Mining Company. Yellow Eagle went belly-up, and is taking a lot of people’s money with it, directly and indirectly. All of the locals knew where the danger spot was, and knew to check to make sure the road was still there before driving across it. We would drive in to work every morning, check the width of the fissures in the asphalt, observe the latest desperate attempt by DOT to keep the road cosmetically pure by putting new asphalt down every other day, chuckle or curse to ourselves, and do the same routine on the way back home. We observed the recklessness of other drivers while steadfastly ignoring our own as we barreled across the gaps in the road or veered way over to the shoulder to avoid them, and cheered DOT in its quixotic efforts to keep the highway intact. Now that freeze-up is upon us, maybe the crumbling will slow down, and DOT can take a winter to figure out what to do. Maybe those nice miners will come back and hand them the many bucks the repair work has cost so far. Maybe DOT will negotiate for the mineral rights, get underwater mining equipment, mine the pot of gold that Yellow Eagle was supposed to almost have gotten to, sell it, and break even. Or maybe the legislature will make a special appropriation from the Permanent Fund for the several millions it will cost to rebuild the road. Urk. The whole shebang is a messy and unpleasant business, and it isn’t over yet. It could stand on its own as a sorry tale of lost fortunes and dashed hopes, mired engineers and warped Alaska roads, but there is a curious familiarity about it that has its most potent example in--what else with an election coming up?--politics. The metaphor goes like this: There’s a literal hole in the ground, and it’s creeping under the road, and it has the decency to give us a little warning before grabbing us and pulling us into the nether depths of Hades. Democracy is like the road: it takes a lot of vote-toting individuals to create a solid surface that we can go careening along, secure in the freedom that the road provides. Those votes keep the road stable. We’ve been watching the voter turnout get smaller and smaller for decades, but the surface of the road still seemed to be fine. Relinquishing one’s rights and freedoms over a long period of time, slowly, means that it’s harder to see. The road gradually gets rougher, and an occasional right disappears off the edge and we don’t notice, or we don’t really care. It was an annoyance to maintain it anyway. But lately, fissures are starting to show up, just like on the Parks Highway. Ralph Nader got banned from the Presidential Debates, first as a participant and then as a ticket-carrying member of the audience--and the police, not security guards, were the ones following orders from the Commission for Presidential Debates (which is a private entity and not an arm of the government, although it wasn’t acting like it that evening). Police officers have broken the law before, abused our trust and misused their power, but very, very rarely do they have the chutzpah to do it to so public and respected a figure--and this while news cameras are rolling. Perhaps these individuals weren’t very bright. Or perhaps they were confident that they could get away with it. Nader’s experience was a blatant example, but maybe you think it is exceptional. Nationally, Democrats who like Nader better than Gore are still going to vote for Gore--out of fear. Never mind that only six or so states have races so close that a vote for Nader would really function like a vote for Bush. Never mind that it’s the Electoral College that determines the outcome of the election, not the popular vote. People are voting for candidates they don’t care for, not for what they want. What kind of vote is that? Just look at our upcoming state election: three measures designed to limit the ability of the Alaska populace to participate in government. Why? Because the Alaska populace can’t be trusted to avoid manipulation. Because the Alaskan voter shouldn’t be involved with governing. And because Alaskans shouldn’t have any direct say in what those duly elected representatives get to do to us. After all, that’s what we elect them for, right? To do our roadwork for us? To limit our choices here in this state, just like our choices are limited on the national level? These chasms in the road of democracy are right out there in the open, unlike the sneaky silt-covered cave that trapped that car so long ago. We can see ‘em before we fall into them. But can we can avoid them? Sure--if we’re brave enough to do the steering ourselves. | ||
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