Dear Friend and Reader:
Just a few brief comments on the government shutdown. Like most people, you may be having difficulty tracking this issue; to me it looks like a government shutdown for its own sake. But it’s one that makes most building takeovers that I’ve covered seem mature, since most students know enough to focus on a few demands that can actually be met by the administration.
One of the ways you know that this situation is drama for its own sake is that the first demand (defund the Affordable Care Act) was not going to happen. By the time the government was shut down and the creeps behind this protest figured that out, the demands started changing — the current one being the promise of discussion of slashing social programs.
All the Republican talk of “jobs, jobs, jobs” has led to their blocking hundreds of thousands of people from being able to go to work. All the talk about supporting small business has been belied by the thousands of businesses hurt or destroyed by the shutdown.
A few things are bugging me. One is that the original pretense, how bad the ACA allegedly is, is not an issue that warrants this kind of radical intervention. Not, particularly, since it’s the affirmed law of the land. Our extremely conservative Supreme Court already approved it, after Congress voted it into law and the president signed it into law. If a small minority wants to take matters into their own hands, that is one definition of tyranny — and thankfully it’s become obvious.