I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America.
It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.
Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.
The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.
All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”
My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.”
And let's not forget the biggest deficiency in American airports: the people who work there.
4 comments:
Thank you for posting these thoughts and observations. Though one can be hopeful, I doubt Americans will ever actually do more than speak to the subject of modernity or improving its society or culture. Just what happens to all that money?
Defense.
I think it's going to change with Obama, though. Didn't he say that he was going to repair the US's aging infrastructure?
Yeah, I hear what you're saying. I feel annoyed/angry/inconvenienced almost every time I go to America and am forced to use their air/bus/train networks. Dangerous, in the case of buses. Inconvenient, in the case of airplanes with all their crazy security regs that other countries seem to have dropped. And impractical, in the case of trains. It seems that cars rule the world in America, to the detriment of the environment and foreign policy that is forced to secure oil from around the world.
And yes, the worst thing about the situation is the people. Why are there so many stupid, ignorant people working at airports? I never have issues with the people working at airports anywhere else, only in the US. It just makes me feel so stressed out!
Under strict FAA / government regulation, air ports in America have little incentive to innovate. Several years ago John Stossel revealed that America's airports that still used shockingly obsolete technology (notably sliding around information written in blocks inside tubes). Any kind of new technology has to go through government approval concerning anti discriminatoin measures, public safety, etc, so we're consistently behind the rest of the world in broadband connection, digitial TV, and more.
Even outside of defense, America wastes gazillions of money on welfare, public education (sucks even harder than airports), subsidy on ethanol and farming, and other forms of handouts.
Government construction jobs on federal buidlings have set wages that sometime exceed 20,30 dollars (Davis Bacon act). I don't know about airports, but building anything in America can be EXPENSIVE. Something tells me the Hong Kong government found ways to cut cost or run an efficient operation on building those modernized airports.
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