A 73-year-old Virginia Beach motorcyclist is dead after a single-vehicle crash on the James River Bridge Saturday afternoon — another American killed on deteriorating infrastructure while Congress ships billions to Ukraine and Israel.
Donald William Keeling was riding southbound on Route 17 around 2:31 p.m. when his motorcycle crashed on the Isle of Wight County span, according to Virginia State Police. He sustained fatal injuries and was pronounced dead at the scene. Next of kin has been notified. The crash remains under investigation.
Keeling's death won't get a hearing on the Senate floor. But a $95 billion foreign aid package did. That's the math in Washington: unlimited money for overseas commitments, pennies for the bridges and roads Americans drive every day.
The James River Bridge carries Route 17 traffic across one of Virginia's critical waterways. It is the kind of infrastructure that working people depend on to get to work, move goods, and live their lives — and it is the kind of infrastructure that gets a patch job when it should get an overhaul. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot reported the bare facts: single-vehicle crash, fatal injuries, investigation ongoing. The local paper did its job. Washington won't do theirs.
This is the bipartisan failure in plain view. Republicans and Democrats can agree on blank checks for foreign governments — over $175 billion to Ukraine alone since 2022, and tens of billions more to Israel — but they cannot agree on a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure fix for roads and bridges that the American Society of Civil Engineers has rated as failing for years. Every dollar sent overseas is a dollar not spent on the James River Bridge, or the road you take to work, or the overpass your kids' school bus crosses.
The establishment press covers foreign aid as moral obligation. It is not. It is a choice — a choice that competes directly with American needs and American lives. When a 73-year-old man dies on a bridge in Virginia, that's not an abstraction. That's the cost of priorities that put foreign governments first and American citizens last.
Virginia State Police removed Keeling's motorcycle from the scene and reopened all lanes. Traffic flows again. The question that lingers is whether anyone in power will ask what it would take to make sure the next motorcyclist makes it home — and whether they'll ever put American infrastructure ahead of foreign wars.
Keeling was 73. He deserved a country that maintained its own roads before rebuilding someone else's.
