I’m a Guardrail, and I Don’t Know What the Fuck You People Want from Me

Okay, so look. I’m your basic galvanized steel thrie-beam guardrail. My job is to keep vehicles from flying off the escarpment and squishing all the people driving on the westbound lane who don’t wanna die just because some mope on the eastbound couldn’t be bothered to keep his hands on the wheel. You know what I wasn’t built for? This Trump bullshit.

If a Mazda spins out at one hundred miles per hour, or a school bus driver has to turn around to yell at Jimmie Jr.—I’m your man. But you drive an eight-ton semi with an airplane propeller stuck to the grill into me at top speed? I mean, there’s only so much malarkey I was engineered to handle, you know? We’re built for normal problems, not the kind of thing you get when you hand the wheel over to a lunatic.

You get some melted Beavis and Butthead action figure with a billboard forehead to put torpedoes on the Oscar Mayer mobile and come at me with a load of kids he’s trafficking—nope, the guardrail will not hold. You get some boomer jabroni with a dead bear in the back seat and a head full of worms to steer an ambulance my way after he sets it on fire—it’s not looking good. You put some D-list talk show host in a—what is that, a fucking Panzer tank? You get the idea. Bye-bye, guardrail. Hello, dead folks on westbound.

Not to mention, if you’ve got a couple of your dictator buddies taking a backhoe to that escarpment and some woo-woo broad drilling holes into my posts—nope. And you’ve got teams of jackasses swarming all over the tarmac, repainting the lines with a bunch of squiggles that—oh, I get it, those are crypto symbols. Very clever, you cretinous taint stains.

Again, I was built to keep people safe during NORMAL-ASS TRAFFIC INCIDENTS. You can’t drop a bomb on an American roadway and then sit there with your “BUT BUT BUT THE GUARDRAILS!!” This is why we have traffic laws and norms, my friend, and you’re gonna miss ’em when every mile of interstate in this country is nothing but a string of burn pits with a couple of vending machines stuck in them. But here you are, voting for President Burn-It-To-The-Ground and acting all surprised when he actually lights a match. I saw this coming miles away, and I don’t even have eyes or a central fucking nervous system.

What I’m trying to say is that if you want a safe and functional road, guardrails are only part of the solution. The rest of it is stuff like maintenance, adherence to the law, and upholding a very basic sense of human decency. I’ll tell ya, when my posts were first sunk into this dirt in nineteen eighty goddamn four, I wouldn’t have thought that would be so hard to understand.

Anyway, when’s Infrastructure Week again?