September 23, 2011; Source: MoveOn | The liberal grassroots organization MoveOn has hit upon an innovative way to dramatize the need for massive federal funding to repair the nation’s infrastructure: Ask members to take pictures of crumbling bridges, roads, schools, and so forth and send them in to form a giant national “punch list” collage of jobs that need doing. The hope is that the photos will build support for new infrastructure spending and/or an infrastructure bank that could potentially put millions of unemployed Americans back to work.
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We applaud the idea but wonder about MoveOn’s “deficit orientation.” While it is undoubtedly useful to photographically document our nation’s crumbling infrastructure, we wonder if the effort could be complemented with a parallel photo campaign in which members are asked to send in photos of useful infrastructure in good repair that we tend to take for granted. Now that would be a “one-two punch” list.—Chris Hartman