I read with interest your editorial regarding the Registry of Motor Vehicle’s culpability in the June tragedy in New Hampshire (“Shameful it took a tragedy for the RMV to do its job,” Sept. 14).
Indeed, such tragedies do provoke state agencies, with the light of media publicity glaring at them, to take steps to clean up their acts. Funny that it happens so often, though. A child’s death being laid at the doorstep of the “negligent” social workers, harm befalling a student the fault of the “negligent” teachers, a crumbling bridge the fault of the “negligent” Department of Public Works.
We point fingers at public defenders, zoning boards, police departments, building inspectors; there seems to be no end to the scapegoats. And yet, your editorial writers (as the public generally does) dropped the ball on identifying the real issue — a lack of money.
Social workers with 40-child caseloads, bridges that had chunks falling from the deck a decade ago, which maybe will be repaired five years from now, school districts that can’t staff up to state mandates. As The Economist once editorialized, Americans are the world champions for demanding services for which they then do not want to pay.
Instead of seeing taxes as the necessary bill for the services we want, we’ve been propagandized into seeing them as our pockets being picked. What is really shameful here isn’t that overworked and overloaded departments let essential services slip through the cracks. It’s that we won’t notice or care — and certainly will angrily reject paying for anything better — until the next tragic headline.
Robert Traynor
Amherst