building bridges

The movie I went to see last night is called "Gateways to New York" and it's about Othmar Ammann, a Swiss engineer who designed and built suspension bridges in New York. You might well wonder, is it possible to make an engaging movie about a civil engineer? And the answer is really...not so much. But the filmmakers padded the movie with lots of cool stock footage and an interesting parallel narrative about the Mohawk ironworkers who worked on the bridges, and though I struggled to stay awake through the actual screening (to be fair, I was tired**), it's been on my mind all day.

The film doesn't comment or take a stand on America's relationship with cars and suburbs, except to say that they motivated the bridges. And the bridges are stunning works of engineering. But up close...I gotta say, when I look at seven lanes of traffic I have a really hard time thinking, "wow, I'm from the greatest country on Earth!"

It was hard not to notice the great preponderance of men in the movie, too - all of the workers on the bridges were male (and probably still are today) but so were all of the engineers and all of the civic leaders. It struck me how all this wasn't very long ago - Amman is from my grandparents' generation, and most of the movie takes place when my parents would have already been young adults.

Which in turn made me think about the Women's March and affirmative action and how much work we do these days to teach our kids that women can also make history (and in fact, often did). But at the same time how little we actually know about what gender equality is going to look like, when we finally get there. It's uncharted territory; we've never done it before. Not to mention what sustainable human life on Earth could look like, or a Catholic Church not weighed down by its own hierarchical structures? Amman worked at a time when men (and women) of vision created iconic structures with mathematics and data and money. We're living in a time when women (and men) of vision are needed to solve global problems with insight and compassion and love. Who will step up?



**see yesterday night's post. My plan was not to stay up after midnight writing tonight. It's 00:15. Um...