Since I have been living in Fort Worth and teaching at TCU, there have been numerous derailments, impacts at railroad crossings, and other train accidents of various kinds, many with serious consequences. Recently a train hit a curve at 100 mph and flipped over in the northeastern US, causing Amtrak to commit to automatic positive train control to avoid future accidents due to excessive speed or proximity to other trains.
Argentina, a country of extensive railways, is of course not immune to accidents either. When I was still living there and attending the American high school, there was a serious train accident. The radio and television news and the newspapers covered it extensively and analyzed the various explanations that were being offered as hypotheses before all the investigation was complete. The day after the accident some of us at school were talking about it in the hearing of our eleventh-grade English teacher. She heard us mention the various explanations, which included brake failure, automatic signalling failure, and others. She said:
"Hmph! It's obviously operator failure. These Argentines..." and went on to imply that the people she lived among were somehow deficient and that in the US such a thing would not happen.
Naturally I was not pleased with that attitude, but I had encountered it before. Besides, I was already tired of defending Argentines to Americans and Americans to Argentines. My family had previously had occasion to fly all over Argentina in the local airlines. The pilots, navigators, and flight engineers were highly professional and had an enviable safety record. After reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes" in Outliers, I assume now that part of that has to do with the fact that Argentines speak their minds openly and no co-pilot is going to let the pilot slip up without telling him or her about it in no uncertain terms.
We are not the only people who have this kind of attitude about people of other countries, but that is no excuse. They are no worse, and no better, than we are. We are no better, and no worse, than they are. If we have been paying attention, we see that our technology from time to time slips out of our grasp and bad things happen. It goes on everywhere.
I sometimes wonder whether our national cultural theme of exceptionalism has contributed to our neglect of our infrastructure. We are so used to thinking we are at the top and that no one else has reached where we are that we often think it's a given for everything to work great and we don't worry about the inevitable breakdown of machines and structures if not kept up. We became great by putting a lot of money into public works of all kinds, including the Interstate Highway system which used to be envied. Now its condition is rapidly deteriorating. Of course our gridlocked politics has a lot to do with our failure to act. If we keep cutting taxes, of course we will not have funds to repair the infrastructure.
We cannot sit back and rest. We must set our formidable capabilities to the task of moving ahead. The corporate world will not do that for us.
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