Today is the anniversary of a bridge collapse.  Most of the town held its breathe to see who would make it home that Wednesday evening from work. 

The things we take for granted.   Those were the things we tried to say Grace over. 

In the past 12 months, Minnesotans were learning that the bridge story really began with the construction of the bridge.  The study of history was always like this.  Take it from a history major.  An interest in history always started in the present day.  Inquiring minds wanted to know how something came to be.  What were the factors? 

And this story was a lot like the story of creation.  Something in my life drew me back to another day.  Another day when there was no bridge.  When there was no money or engineering to have cars and trucks and bridges.  Or reason.  Before the community decided we needed a bridge and who would all pay for it.  The creation story eventually evolved into one of maintenance.    That bridge was there the day I got my driver’s license.  I took it for granted. 

I never gave thought to who built that bridge or how it was constructed or maintained.  Or the cost.  I never had used it that much.  But I still had crossed it in the course of business travel.  It could have been me in the river.   Like any memorial day, we celebrate those of us alive.  And those of us we miss.  Including those who had come together to create that bridge so that life in the future could be easier.     

I live in a town where since last August 1, 2008 there has been a heightened awareness about crossing a bridge.  One day last November, the oldest business in the state of Minnesota had lost its identity, with little note made.  There is more awareness this week over the loss of the headquarters of a major airline.  And there was awareness over the national convention of one of the major political parties which would be here in less than 5 months. 

Most residents of the two cities seemed asleep as to whether the Minneapolis StarTribune or the St. Paul Pioneer Press would be around to cover the national convention.  A pending bankruptcy of the StarTribune Company was written about on May 4^th in the New York Post.  It has currently been denied.

The threat of collapse of either enterprise was not just the loss of a local source of news.  The news could be read elsewhere, without a local taste.  Small towns in Minnesota had been going through similiar change, with consolidated school districts for most of the last twenty-five years.  And that will be the direction of the churches in the archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, as throughout the country, for the next decade.

What exactly did they teach in MBA programs where consolidations were supposed to be workable when smaller companies could not survive?

I had worked in downtown Chicago 18 years ago when I heard a contemporary, a suburbanite, bemoan the loss of identity of the suburb where he had grown up.  He felt that Arlington Heights was suddenly just like any other suburb in Chicago, in America. Without any flavor.  Tasteless.   Or had it been Elk Grove?

How soon would Minneapolis–St. Paul be just tasteless, without a flavor?  The loss of ethnic identity was having an effect on this generation of Americans.  As people I saw lost a sense of belonging, a sense of anger seemed to be a substitute, to those of the other party who might be responsible for the current state of affairs.  The community already seemed fractured.  But the stress fracture seemed to be getting worse.  A lot like what had happened to those gusset plates in that bridge structure that led to the collapse.