The word “snafu” entered our language in the Army during WWII. Apparently, the origin came from an encoder that translated English into five letter blocks of code. Some men at the Army base in San Louis Obispo started to think about what they might mean, and SNAFU became “Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”.

http://www.snafu.com/Snafu/SnafuStory.html

It caught on because the term SNAFU described how the Army worked through the war. Everything was a mess, and everyone was used to it. But it all worked out somehow, through the grit of the people caught up in any one situation. Taken together, it was a “system”. On any given day, it was snafu.

Watching the aftermath of the I-35W Bridge collapse shows how incredibly snafu everything is today. A lot of people have noted how we can spend upwards of a trillion dollars in Iraq and have bridges that fall down at home. I like to joke that it’s part of a plan to bring the whole world together, because once we all live on one smoldering pile of broken concrete all of humanity will have something in common. It’s hard to deny that some parts of Minneapolis bear a striking resemblance to Baghdad.

A good hard look at what’s going on shows that this is more than priorities twisted like bridge girders.

For example, Jeremy Hernandez was given a full scholarship to study to be an auto mechanic by a local trade school because of his heroism in rescuing 61 kids from the schoolbus teetering on the bridge. He was working as a counselor with these kids largely because he had to drop out of the school for lack of money. It’s not a problem for him any more. If only more of today’s youth realized that the path to success comes from rescuing 61 children, we wouldn’t have the problems we have. You talk to a lot of the kids out there, and ask them if they’ve ever rescued 61 children, and most will tell you they haven’t. No wonder they can’t succeed!

As for the kids, it’s wonderful that they all survived without major injuries despite how snafu our highways are. But keep in mind these are poor kids – none of them had health insurance. So there’s a fund going to raise money to pay for their medical care. It’s a good thing their injuries were captured on teevee cameras, isn’t it?

Personally, I have a long term solution to the health care crisis. I think we take everyone involved in the current system, and line them up with their backs to the wall and shoot them. We don’t kill them, we merely hurt them. I just want them to have to walk into an Emergency Room with a gunshot wound to see what that does to their opinion of the current system.

Meanwhile, we’re cleaning up from an utterly preventable disaster and taking care of all the bits and pieces that we can. The “system” that is doing it is being cobbled together even as it works because the people who are doing the work are loving and smart and dedicated. I only hope they get a chance to look around while they do it because this isn’t much of a “system” at all. It’s just snafu.