MOTIF SHOULD REFLECT BRIDGE PLAZA PROJECT’S ENDPOINT: FORTRESS AMERICA

he submitted designs in August 2009 for the new Bridge Plaza’s decorative façade were admirable, but fall way short of telling the truth. This new bridge plaza is unnecessary, a waste of good money, brought to us by those from the outside of Port Huron, who would profit by turning our town into a barricade against barbarians/giant truck stop. It is a government pork barrel, sold to us at a price we can’t refuse, by the neophyte Department of Homeland Security. Its basis is fear of the foreigner.

Designs to sit atop the Blue Water Bridge Plaza to make it more palatable

Since fear is the fundamental motivating factor in this new Bridge Plaza Project, the plaza’s artistic theme should reflect this fact. Enough of 40 to 60 ft. light house and sailboat motifs! My suggestion would be a prison wall, barb wire, and guard tower sculpture to loom high above this new Blue Water Bridge Plaza {which in reality takes us deeper into a Fortress America mindset}. An alternative monument could be a representation of the Statue of Liberty, clothed head to toe in a bristling body suit of barbed wire. The words above her head in flashing neon could read, “Stand back--you tired, poor, those yearning to be free!”

Do we want to see her shrouded in body armor and barbed wire?

But, alas, in the unbridled effort to protect our prosperity, we actually surrender our own freedom, paradoxically deep-six our economy, in the end only to be “mooned” by our nearest neighbors.* Pity we in the U.S. waste so much of our treasure, and turn our backside on our principles, in the futile struggle to be iron-clad invincible.

Adding more fiscal insult to injury, today's [3-1-2010] Port Huron Times Herald has a front page article on current lack of funding for the Blue Water Bridge Plaza project.** Apparently most of the required money will come from loans that State of Michigan taxpayers will have to repay, or from toll increases. With only 19% of the estimated $583 million thus far secured, what will Michigan taxpayer debt be? What will the toll rise to? Congresswoman Candice Miller calls the project "absolutely critical." To whom? Why? Port Huron residents receive no meaningful money from this; instead only a study of how to promote our area, with mounting unsecured bridge plaza debt, significant lost tax base, and ten years of a big mess.

Bridge plaza planners please stop. It’s not too late. Don’t demolish 30 businesses, and 125 homes, [$500,000 per year of our city tax base]. Build us a new Black River Bridge for I-94. It’s needed. Don’t waste any more of our tax dollars on a bridge plaza renovation, just to please Mount Clemens and other Southeast Michigan based contractors, Congresswoman Miller who represents them on the House Transportation and Homeland Security committees, and the many more outstate, national, government- favored corporations.

ort Huron could be a beautiful jewel in this Midwest water wonderland. We need creative projects like the proposed Lake Huron University [expanding St. Clair Community College into a four year university], and power generating river turbines, and windmills, folded into our landscape, enlarging our worldview. These can be designed and manufactured right here in our area, and can inspire us all, to engage, interconnect with, and make better, every corner of our world. In conclusion I offer this prayer.

Prayer in a Time of Contrived Fear

God of peace, we live in a culture
that seeks to manipulate us through fear:
Headlines scream: “Be afraid!” Advertisements
prod our deepest insecurities and anxieties.
Our political and corporate leaders
know that if we fear, then they can do
whatever they want and we will follow.
But over and over again in scripture,
You call to us: “Be not afraid!”
Your words penetrate, us past the noise,
over the tumult: “Do not fear…”
From Your Word we regain
our freedom. No longer afraid, we speak
the truth, we live the truth,
and we become that peace which we seek.
In Your peace, we pray: Amen.

By Tom Cordaro
Pax Christi USA

For more of his writing on response to the current manufactured fear factors, please read his book,
Be not Afraid: An Alternative to the “War on Terror”