The Government Shutdown

The Government Shutdown
The View from the Middle

It was freezing cold here yesterday in Northwest Arkansas, a bit like a snow day of old when I was growing up in northern Indiana. I’m a little older now, so instead of going sledding or having a snowball fight, my wife and I snuggled on the couch and binge watched the Hunger Games series. It’s a classic story of good vs. evil. It’s an inspiring tale of the battle between man’s unquenchable desire for freedom and the insidious “Capitol”.
“The Capitol” was a sinister and gluttonous center of a country that it divided into twelve districts. The Capitol sucked the resources out of all the districts and then squandered them on its own decadent, selfish and wasteful lifestyle. The Capitol isolated the rest of the country into silo districts to prevent any form of unity and even pitted the districts against each other by forcing them to participate in the “Hunger Games” each year.
How could they do that, you ask? We are left to imagine the path The Capitol took to convince these districts to give up so much and accept a meager, barely life supportive existence. First, they had to disarm the districts. There is a minimum of weapons in the districts. We can only assume that The Capitol convinced its citizens to give up their weapons with a promise of protection and safety.
The Capitol also “provided” housing for its citizens, which allowed them to segregate the people into manageable groups. While their existence is Spartan, it’s sufficient to keep them alive. And The Capitol attempts to persuade the districts that they should actually take pride in The Capitol’s voracious, indulgent lifestyle, because it is they who provide it.
The Capitol also establishes a propaganda campaign of misleading, deceptive and even dishonest rhetoric to keep the districts off balance. While President Snow appears “fatherly” in all of his telecasts, he is actually condescending in his attitude of the people in the districts. In fact, in the final episode, he admits the way he feels about the districts. He says, “They don’t understand our sophistication (in The Capitol)”. Sophistication? Is that what we should call it?
Sorry, this is a huge tangent, but The Capitol reminds me of some place here in America. What is that place? Oh well, let me get back on subject. Should we have a government shutdown? Who cares! Despite all of the “sky is falling” rhetoric, nothing happens and nothing changes. Even when the Obama administration tried to make that shutdown as painful as possible by barricading open-air monuments and state parks, nothing changed. Government workers receive a paid vacation, because their salaries were paid retroactively. Nothing seems to change to vicious, deceitful, devious hogwash that comes out of our nation’s capital.
Ahhhhhh! It just came to me!

Let's also be honest with ourselves. DACA will be fixed by early March and Democrats are simply terrified that after eight years of ignoring this issue under the Obama administration, it will be resolved by the Trump administration. This shutdown is just their feeble attempt to get credit for that fix. Call me cynical, but I think politicians, in this case the Democrats, are more concerned about getting the laurels than they are about the actual lives of the very dreamers to pretend to care about.