Shutdown
02/10/13 04:38
I’m not sure that I’m doing much better than the federal government this morning. I had my blog written and hit the “publish” button before 5 a.m., but then for some reason my computer got hung up. I kept waiting, thinking that the problem would resolve itself, but after 45 minutes I gave up and restarted the computer. Of course I hadn’t saved, so whatever brilliance was contained in the first draft of today’s blog is lost. And I am in a bit of a hurry today because I want to get some work done at the office before the others arrive. “The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get!”
So you don’t need any more information about the government shut down and I don’t have any wisdom to add. I was, however, thinking about our 2½-year-old grandson yesterday. One of the great things about being a grandparent is the absolute joy of watching your children as parents. Our son is an engaged, exciting, connected and creative father. I don’t know if anything in my life has made me feel more pride than watching him and his son together. And our grandson has the added blessing of an exceptional mother. Together they are doing a great job of raising their son and forming a family. Before his third birthday, our grandson knows that temper tantrums don’t work. You don’t always get your own way and yelling louder isn’t the way to accomplish the things that you want. Sometimes life can be very frustrating for a 2-year-old, but he is learning to use language and persuasion and he is also learning that there are other people in this world with thoughts, feelings and intentions that are different from his.
There is a part of me that wants to write to our elected officials in Washington, D.C., and ask if they might, for a few days, act as mature as my grandson.
So there are some things about the government shutdown that I don’t understand. I’m not sure how you can close over 400 National Parks, museums and monuments. I understand that you can lock the doors to the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., but how do you close Yellowstone National Park. Even if the people at the entrance kiosks don’t show up for work, the road continues to go into the park. My memory of the grand arch at Gardiner is that there is no gate to close in that entrance. And if they did put up a temporary fence, what about the people who live in Mammoth? What are they supposed to do, stay locked in the park and adopt a survivalist lifestyle until it is re-opened? Yellowstone is an enormous amount of territory. Without the National Park Service people are bound to go into the park and they might not be as inclined to follow the rules.
You can’t get any information about it from the park’s web site. If you go there, you find that the web is “closed.” There is a redirect to the Department of Interior web page that contains a letter to government employees from President Obama about the shutdown.
One web site that I visited declared that all weddings scheduled for the national mall in Washington D.C. have been cancelled. Now that is a lot of gall! They can’t cancel weddings. Some weddings might have to be postponed. Others might have to find new locations, but shutting down the government isn’t going to stop people from getting married. For what it is worth, we don’t have any weddings scheduled in our church in the next two weeks. We’d be glad to accommodate those who are looking for a place to get married with the mall “closed.” I doubt if they can keep all of the joggers off of the mall.
They didn’t keep people from looking at Mt. Rushmore. The busses went up the road as usual. The parking lot, garage, viewing platform, restaurant and gift shop were closed. I suspect so were the rest rooms. But you can’t exactly stop people from looking at the side of a mountain that has been carved.
I was delighted to see that the Honor Flight veterans from Mississippi and Louisiana who were visiting Washington D.C. were allowed to visit the WWII memorial. When the arrived the area was fenced off and a gate blocked their entrance, but someone found a way to open the gates. Presumably if it was a Park Service employee that person was working for free. At any rate that person did the right thing. If I had been that employee, I would have probably tried to turn on the fountains for the time that the World War II vets were visiting their memorial.
The official Capitol twitter feed is down, but individual twitter accounts of congressmen and women remain active. I think they should shut those down as well. In fact, I favor taking all of their smartphones and tablets away and locking them in their chambers until they come up with a workable plan. If the government is shut down, it ought to be illegal to be fundraising for the next campaign. Such, however, is not the case.
NASA has decided not to furlough the two astronauts who are on the International Space Station. They are to report to work as usual. The Curiosity Rover on Mars, however, is officially de-funded. I don’t know if that means they will park it until the government gets back in business or if they have just turned off the public cameras. The panda cam at the national zoo is also turned off.
I won’t miss much of that, but I do think that it is tragic that WIC has been shut down. The program may continue in some states, but they won’t be reimbursed for their expanses during the shutdown. Because a group of Senators and Representatives insist on behaving like infants, real infants might not get the nutrition and health care that they need to grow into healthy adults. In my opinion, that is a crying shame.
So you don’t need any more information about the government shut down and I don’t have any wisdom to add. I was, however, thinking about our 2½-year-old grandson yesterday. One of the great things about being a grandparent is the absolute joy of watching your children as parents. Our son is an engaged, exciting, connected and creative father. I don’t know if anything in my life has made me feel more pride than watching him and his son together. And our grandson has the added blessing of an exceptional mother. Together they are doing a great job of raising their son and forming a family. Before his third birthday, our grandson knows that temper tantrums don’t work. You don’t always get your own way and yelling louder isn’t the way to accomplish the things that you want. Sometimes life can be very frustrating for a 2-year-old, but he is learning to use language and persuasion and he is also learning that there are other people in this world with thoughts, feelings and intentions that are different from his.
There is a part of me that wants to write to our elected officials in Washington, D.C., and ask if they might, for a few days, act as mature as my grandson.
You can’t get any information about it from the park’s web site. If you go there, you find that the web is “closed.” There is a redirect to the Department of Interior web page that contains a letter to government employees from President Obama about the shutdown.
One web site that I visited declared that all weddings scheduled for the national mall in Washington D.C. have been cancelled. Now that is a lot of gall! They can’t cancel weddings. Some weddings might have to be postponed. Others might have to find new locations, but shutting down the government isn’t going to stop people from getting married. For what it is worth, we don’t have any weddings scheduled in our church in the next two weeks. We’d be glad to accommodate those who are looking for a place to get married with the mall “closed.” I doubt if they can keep all of the joggers off of the mall.
They didn’t keep people from looking at Mt. Rushmore. The busses went up the road as usual. The parking lot, garage, viewing platform, restaurant and gift shop were closed. I suspect so were the rest rooms. But you can’t exactly stop people from looking at the side of a mountain that has been carved.
The official Capitol twitter feed is down, but individual twitter accounts of congressmen and women remain active. I think they should shut those down as well. In fact, I favor taking all of their smartphones and tablets away and locking them in their chambers until they come up with a workable plan. If the government is shut down, it ought to be illegal to be fundraising for the next campaign. Such, however, is not the case.
NASA has decided not to furlough the two astronauts who are on the International Space Station. They are to report to work as usual. The Curiosity Rover on Mars, however, is officially de-funded. I don’t know if that means they will park it until the government gets back in business or if they have just turned off the public cameras. The panda cam at the national zoo is also turned off.
I won’t miss much of that, but I do think that it is tragic that WIC has been shut down. The program may continue in some states, but they won’t be reimbursed for their expanses during the shutdown. Because a group of Senators and Representatives insist on behaving like infants, real infants might not get the nutrition and health care that they need to grow into healthy adults. In my opinion, that is a crying shame.