Sinking, like a bridge over troubled waters

There was something about the way the bridge went down without a fuss that was almost mesmerising. As if it had been waiting for this moment. As if it was a relief from the strain of staying up, as if it was sinking down gratefully into the water. In the video, it looked as if the bridge was barely touched, as if a tiny boat just glanced off it and it took a dive, any excuse to lie down.

But of course, in reality, it was nothing like that. In reality it was big and catastrophic. In reality we rely on bigger and bigger ships to ferry all our stuff around the world, and bigger and bigger bridges to get us all from A to B conveniently. We have conquered the oceans, we have spanned the rivers and bays and ports.

Or so we thought.

It turns out all it takes is the power to go out.

We used to think they had all this stuff in hand, that the people in charge had it sorted. We barely gave a thought to supply chains back in the age of innocence. People building the bridges knew what they were doing.

People building the boats knew what they were doing. People driving the boats knew what they were doing. And it all just worked. And your new car came from somewhere, somehow. And your packages arrived, full of cheap crap from China.

And sometimes you sent stuff back, and maybe that went into landfill. Who knows? Who cared?

And then there was a pandemic, and we realised how fragile it all is. We realised that seamless transport all over the world applied to deadly pathogens too. And that any hint of disruption could cause shortages of foods, medicines, masks. It didn’t even take a pandemic. Just one boat stuck in a canal could hold up the whole shooting match. No matter how much we think we have everything sorted, we realised, shit happens.

We like to think that after these upsets, we go back to believing that everything is fine. That they have things in hand. That we can rely on the boats, the bridges, the ground beneath our feet. But all the time, quietly, our old certainty is eroded. Now, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, we sometimes believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Half of them might be true, and half not, but that barely matters anymore either.

Out of the blue, the Taoiseach quits at noon because he can’t take anymore. The DUP leader steps down in much darker circumstances. The Poles warn of war in western Europe. A young mother with cancer has to sit on a bench explaining why she wants to be left alone. A man falls off a trolley and dies, and no one notices… in a hospital. A narcissistic, fraudster cartoon sweeps the board to represent one half of America.

And maybe that’s why the image of the bridge seemed to sum up so much. We used to think America, of all places, had things, things like bridges and democracy, reasonably in hand. But it turns out that, while it looked from the outside like it was solid, all it takes is the slightest tip to make the whole thing give up and slowly, without fuss, collapse into the sea.