sabotabby | Aliens built the TTC (Reply)

I had brunch with a friend I hadn't seen in a long time, and we were talking (of course) politics and the pervasiveness of the "but how we will pay for it???" ideology. (I agree that it's a question worth asking—it's just usually asked as a rhetorical question to shut down debate, when it is actually a question that has an answer.) Basically, the idea that one invests in social good and infrastructure has been in rapid decline since the 80s. You couldn't build a subway system now—witness the Scarborough One Stop Wonder. People would get deadlocked wondering how to pay for it, rather than considering it an essential civic investment and just getting the thing done.

I compared it to when you see white people talking about the pyramids. Like, how did they have the technology back then? How did they figure it out? What a mystery! Must have been aliens!

Now we're existing in the ruins of a mightier civilization. Waiting for the subway (well, haha, not this weekend). Wondering, I can only suppose: How did they build this wonder? What kind of marvellous technology did the ancients of the 1960s have? How did they pay for it???