DAN'S PAPERS, September 17, 2010 Page 16 www.danshamptons.com
Labor Day
(continued from page 13)
ond degree assault and reckless endangerment. And so that was that. Meanwhile, down the street, another contractor pulled over to the side of the road and another red-blooded person from south of the border, here either legally or illegally, got in and was driven off to perform some labor. That night, President Obama made a speech in Cleveland to a group of unionized working men. He said that he plans to jump start the American worker next week by asking Congress for $50 billion in new funding for the repair of American bridges, highways, tunnels, aqueducts and other public works. I can’t think of a better time to do this except for maybe a year and a half ago when he had just gotten into office and promised just before he was elected to immediately order hundreds of billions of dollars for “shovel ready” projects around the country to help Americans get back to work. He actually didn’t do that at that time. I
thought that he did. “Shovel ready” was such a catchy phrase and God knows that the Bush administration sure left him with a big mess to take care of and I was sure he was going to do it. Here on the East End, I saw no evidence of any “shovel ready” projects underway at that time. I just figured that because things seemed to be so much worse in the rest of the country—in Louisiana and Ohio and Arkansas and so forth— that all the men with the shovels were busy in those places and would get to us soon enough. Turns out that although Obama spent over a trillion dollars bailing out Wall Street and another half a trillion dollars bailing out the automakers, he never did get around to starting any “shovel ready” projects. And so the single most needed “shovel ready” project in the Hamptons— the repair of our roads on County Road 39 and the Montauk Highway farther east, slowly crumbling under the continuous weight of four lanes of traffic day and night—never happened at all.
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I’m sure you’ve noticed this. From Southampton through to Amagansett along these roads, the main roads leading in and out of the Hamptons, the potholes have been backbreakingly horrendous. Our Villages and Town Highway Departments, in spite of their depleted budgets, have stepped in to try to patch them as best they can with some lightweight matter, but there are lots of people out here—I’m one of them—who have developed back problems from driving cars all chittery all over these roads. And at least twice a day, people who drive out to the Hamptons and back pass the big scene in front of the 7-Eleven, hanging onto their steering wheels real tight. But I digress. So yes, finally, Obama is going at long last ask Congress for $50 billion for “shovel ready” projects. And guess what? He’s proposing this right into the teeth of the Congressional campaign season. There’s only two weeks left to go before all the Congressmen go home for recess and the campaigning. And there isn’t a Republican among them worth his salt who is going to vote for this since any triumph in this department in helping out the American Working Man at this particular time is going to do nothing but send voters fleeing to the Democrats in droves. (Over very bumpy roads, but nevertheless.) And so, I have to say, if you’ve gotten your shovel out of the garage and gotten it ready at this point in this article, just grab it from where you stabbed it happily into the ground alongside the driveway and put it back into the garage again. And Happy Labor Day to you too, sir.