Driving south toward Key West, the road narrows, the sky spreads out, and the sea becomes your constant companion. It’s one of the most beautiful stretches of pavement in the country. But somewhere before Marathon, your eyes snag on something off to the right — something that doesn’t fit with the turquoise water and the postcard-perfect horizon.

An old bridge with broken railings. Rust is bleeding down the concrete like old wounds. And grass — wild, waist-high grass — is growing straight out of what used to be a proud engineering marvel.

The Old Seven Mile Bridge was once the backbone of the Overseas Highway, the miracle that connected the Keys to the mainland. Today it’s a collapsed ribcage parallel to the modern road. It’s like a ghost or a monument to a country that used to build things and now seems to let them rot.

Every time I drive past it, it hits me: this is America in a single image.

We used to build railroads across oceans, hoist cities into the sky, and lay out highways with the confidence of a young nation that believed in its own future. Now the old bridge sits there, sun-bleached and fractured, and nobody wants to touch it. Restoring it would cost too much—a billion. Removing it would cost even more. So the official plan — and this is real — is to let it decay “naturally,” which is bureaucratic shorthand for “we gave up.”

And that, I’m afraid, is the story of our era. We haven’t just stopped building. We’ve stopped caring.

You can feel it in the unfilled potholes, the rusted guardrails, the sagging electric grid that buckles every summer, the collapsing school buildings, and the airports still shaped like the 1960s. You sense it in the constant apologies: Sorry, the system is down. Sorry, we can’t staff that. Sorry, the supply chain is behind. We’ve become a nation that improvises through dysfunction rather than solving it.

People blame politics, or the economy, or whoever their favorite devil happens to be, but the truth is simpler and sadder: the American spirit has been exhausted. The institutions are tired. Communities are frayed. Trust has evaporated. Everything feels temporary — patched, jury-rigged, or one bad storm away from falling into the sea.

And maybe that old bridge sticks with me because it wasn’t always like this.

When Henry Flagler built the original railway to Key West in the early 1900s–an insane, audacious dream–America was electrified by possibility. The country was bold. Wild. Reckless in the best way. We took on challenges because they were hard. We built things simply because we believed they should exist.

What happened to that?

Somewhere along the way we shifted from a nation of builders to a nation of managers. We manage decline. We monitor risk. We negotiate failure. We study problems until they calcify. We form committees, hold hearings, and draft reports that nobody reads. Meanwhile, the cracks widen. The wires corrode. The bridges sag.

And like that old span in the Keys, we just let it happen.

Travel has a way of sharpening these realizations. When you go abroad — to Europe, Asia, even places you wouldn’t expect — you see high-speed trains, gleaming airports, new tunnels, new metros, new roads. Other countries invest in their future. We argue about ours. They build; we bicker. They repair; we delay. They plan fifty years out; we struggle to plan past next Tuesday.

We used to be the envy of the world. Now we’re the cautionary tale.

The sad part is that the decay isn’t just physical. It’s cultural. You see it in how people talk to each other. In the cynicism. The anger. The disconnection. Everyone is anxious, exhausted, suspicious, overextended. The country feels like it’s running on fumes — and sometimes on resentment. There’s a brittleness that wasn’t there before. A sense that the seams are coming apart.

Maybe that’s why the old bridge feels like a symbol. It reminds us of a version of America that believed in connection — literally and figuratively. The bridge was built to unite the Keys with the mainland, to bring people together. And now it sits broken, fenced off, cut into pieces, no longer serving the purpose it was created for. Sound familiar?

I’m not claiming the story is over. America has reinvented itself before. It has survived civil wars, depressions, corruption, upheavals, and chaos. But reinvention requires will. It requires clarity. It requires admitting that things are not fine — that the decline isn’t an illusion or a phase or a partisan talking point. It’s real. It’s visible. You can literally drive past it.

Just look to your right on the way to Key West.

That bridge is telling us something. The question is whether we’re listening.