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Crozet, VA, January 31, 2018, 3:10PM EST
The Amtrak train left the station this morning carrying GOP members of Congress and their families to their annual party conference at a retreat facility in West Virginia. The train crashed into a garbage truck at a crossing near the town of Crozet, VA. The truck was demolished and garbage was strewn across the landscape. On-site accounts indicate that one person was killed and at the time of this writing there are a handful of minor injuries reported.
The NTSB is on the way and will do its customary professional investigation to determine what went wrong. As of now, though, there has been no explanation offered for the reason the truck was on the tracks.
We offer condolences to the dear ones of the person who died, as well as good wishes for the injured.
Intending no disrespect whatsoever, this crash is a near-perfect metaphor for every day in DC. We see legislators barreling down their own narrow tracks. They can’t get where they want to go because they run into an obstruction. Some won’t negotiate fairly to find a suitable solution and we the people are left with a big mess.
This qualifies as the best metaphor of 2018 to date. It may not be bested all year, although it likely will be figuratively repeated often.
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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we’re on a path to continually fail to make things better. It’s my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That’s the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
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3 Responses to Best Metaphor
Douglas Binkley January 31, 2018
Jack, I have also been thinking of the Republican party as a train wreck for a while. And this event does seem incredibly appropriate. We can only hope it presages what they’ll look like if they try to mess with Mueller!
John Calia January 31, 2018
Our lives would be better if we took away their trains. We don’t need them heading down the tracks, narrow or otherwise. We need them to stop interfering in our businesses, raiding our wallets and imposing their moral order on us.
Sharon Sanders January 31, 2018
I like your metaphor, and it also speaks to our horrendously inadequate infrastructure that needs new tracks, guardrails, streets, highways, bridges–and money coming from the government to contract the rebuilding out to companies, not the government giving the contracts directly to the private companies so that they can turn around and charge us whatever they want for use of our roads and bridges.