I am not in a festive mood. After Hoboken’s Thanksgiving water main break, I am rather grumpy. Before the water main break, I was wondering what to write about for this week, and I found my answer when looking at a piece of trash on the ground.
How, I wondered, could this still happen in today’s society? At a ridiculously young age, “don’t litter” and “reduce, reuse, recycle” are pounded into our heads. How stupid could you possibly be to disrupt our planet? Or perhaps you just think your contribution didn’t matter? Or maybe that you wouldn’t get caught? Regardless, if you litter, you’re a moron and a part of the environmental catastrophe that we as a society are in.
Stupidity! How you annoy me so! And worse yet, is when stupid people, like the morons who litter, manage to get into positions where they make decisions! This is where the water main broke and all of my built up frustration over stupidity boiled over.
Why did we have such a big problem with the water mains? It is really simple, even though SUEZ (formerly United Water) has not yet given a reason for the water main break. It is obvious that poor maintenance is to blame. In the 1990s, then Mayor Russo made a deal with then United Water to manage the municipal water lines, primarily due to a lack of budget for maintaining Hoboken’s infrastructure. The initial deal was made to save money, so logically there wasn’t enough money in the deal to perform adequate repairs to the water mains, which at the time were about 120 years old and already in need of replacement/repair. This ultimately led to the state of disrepair that we have today, with the ill-repaired water system now nearly 150 years old.
In terms of stupidity, former Mayor Russo is the focus of my attention right now. Now, to his credit, maybe he knew that it was a bad idea to be cheap with infrastructure, and his water deal was the lesser of two evils (do nothing or sell to United Water). But, even if that was the case, it is his responsibility as a public official to inform the public of critical issues so they can vote on things in a knowledgeable manner. (Because, people in general are absolutely stupid, and if the mass populace isn’t being fed logical information, they’ll rely on passions and other illogical drivers to make decisions, and that never leads to very smart thinking.) So it was his job to tell people to vote to put more tax money into the infrastructure, and to convince people it is a smart idea (because it is, and if you try to argue this too far, you’ll be dead to me), and he screwed up.
But stupidity is not limited to public office—we can find it right here at Stevens!
Have you seen the sinkhole at Babbio? Or maybe the falling panels on Babbio? Or maybe the collapse of the gatehouse building? Or better, all of the leaking ceilings, faulty lights, broken chairs, and shoddy elevators. Who the hell approved this crap?! Oh… yeah, the upper administration did. The mysterious shadow-figures who control campus whom I may have never seen!
You see, never before has a truth been more evident to me: Stevens trains smart people, but the people who govern it are not held to the same intellectual standards.
Listen, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” is hardly true. Lemme ask you this, would you rather pay $5,000.00 to repair a leaky ceiling? Poke around, pay the cost to repair it? Or would you rather pay $50,000.00 to replace the tiles that got damaged and all of the pipes that were corrupted because of a rupture? It pays to invest in repairs! It is really simple. I would love to see the pay checks of some of the administrators at Stevens. If Stevens can’t afford to make effective repairs to lighting and plumbing, there is no reason any person in charge of the system should be making over $100,000 a year (personal opinion; if you don’t like it, go on and yell at me).
But, I guess, to goons and unintelligent monkeys in suits, this train of thinking is too farsighted—they’d rather just deal with problems in their immediate presence. Stupidity will be the death of me.
