This country is now like an old aircraft whose wings are full of cracks and corrosion. Sure, it keeps flying, it looks pretty good, and it chugs along. But every day the cracks from corrosion and stress get bigger and more and more metal and beams get worn out and over stressed. And the cracks almost imperceptibly expand. Nobody wants to take the time and effort or spend the money to fix them or replace the bad parts.
Yet she continues to fly.
Then one day (all of a sudden) a sharp turn or a bit of unexpected turbulence over stresses a cracked and damaged wing box. The left wing shears in a split second and snaps off catastrophically, without warning. The fall from altitude is rapid, fatal, uncontrollable.
Nobody saw it coming? Wrong. There was plenty of warning. A lot of people knew it might be coming but put off the required inspections, maintenance and overhauls. The overworked mechanics were screaming their heads off that repairs must be made. Once they were minor but now they are major. But there was simply too much money to be made by the crew and their greedy friends and employers. Nobody could foresee when that excess small amount of stress would be on that wing, causing it to utterly fail. It's always kept flying before. Why wouldn't this flight make it too?
That is about what it will be like. The once fine new machine, engineered and built by experts who carefully wrote the maintenance and instruction manuals (now mostly ignored as "out of date"), is now a tired old overweight bag of corrupt, bankrupt, corroded, overstressed metal and fiberglass... just waiting for the final fatal stress to occur. Nobody knows when that will be. Nobody. In fact, they have been flying it so long there are those who say it will never happen!
Meanwhile, the current crop of eager pilots are yanking and banking gaily on the controls, trying to get some more airspeed and hours out of her while they get handsomely paid for their stewardship of this old lady. The stress cracks slowly get larger but they don't figure the Bad Thing will happen on their shift. After all, there is a lot of money, power, and perks to be had for those in the cockpit and their friends and employers who are profiting handsomely.
They just hope the wings stay on until after the next crew takes over. Then it's not their problem.
One day they won't. They just won't. The failure will be unforeseen. After all, she has weathered thousands of other higher "G" turns and thunderstorms safely before, hasn't she? But on that day, in that moment, she over stresses beyond the fatal limit and the cracks cascade.
The end will be very quick, violent, ugly, total - and "unexpected".
Interesting analogy. Scary and very likely true.