Shut down

I keep trying to write about the shutdown, and I keep stalling out. Politics and economics are not my things, and I don't want to get something wrong, and it's not directly affecting me; but still, it's happening and I feel that it would be irresponsible of me to ignore it. So let me try one more time.

The American government has shut down. You can read much better informed explanations of why elsewhere, so I'm not going to try to do that here.

All staff members deemed "nonessential" have been sent home and told they are not allowed work. Here in the suburbs of Washington DC, this affects a huge number of people - I don't think I'd be exaggerating to say probably more than half the families I know have at least one person out of work over this. It's been going on for two weeks now, and that's 14 days too long.

We are lucky and not much has changed in our household. My husband is a contractor who works at a government facility. As such, he is expected to continue working (and will continue to be paid) but he can't go into his office, because it's closed. Nor can he access most of the big computers he usually remotely logs into to do his work, because they've been taken offline. He's working from home when it's quiet here, and from Starbucks when the kids come home from school.

This whole thing is insane. The government is holding the people hostage. The thing is, I'm not sure the government actually knows what sort of effect it's having, so I don't think it's working. All the people in the top offices are probably considered "essential," so it's business as usual for them, only worse, I imagine. They're not seeing the regular people, the moms and dads who are unaccustomedly picking their kids up from preschool and walking around the park and playing video games in the middle of the day and taking the opportunity to paint the hall and trying to quell that gnawing, nagging voice that keeps them awake at night asking "Will I get paid? Will the bank let us pay a reduced amount this month? What if I don't get a check at all? When will this end?"

The knock-on effects are enormous - restaurants and cafes that rely on lunchtime trade from the huge NASA or FDA office campuses, daycares whose children are not attending because their parents are home from work; people whose livelihoods are in jeopardy, and who might not recover even if the government reopens tomorrow. (It won't.)

And then I read about the Antarctic.

This is stupid. It's farcical. It's not the way a country that sees itself as a world leader is supposed to behave towards its citizens, its working people, its families. Be in charge, dammit, Government. Bring the people back and let them do their jobs.

Come on, Mr Obama. I know you're in there.

Ballot

Dash is off school tomorrow because of the election, so if I'm going to say anything I suppose I'd better say it now.

I happened to be in California when the Bush v Gore election took place in 2000. I barely knew who was who at that point, but I was told that everyone in the office was Democrat except for one lone Republican. That was the year the count was drawn out over days and nobody knew for sure who had won for quite a while. And still, I didn't know enough to care one way or the other. I thought Gore looked a bit slimy, with his aquiline nose and his supercilious stare.

The next time there was an election, I was living in Texas and already blogging. I was disappointed but not terribly surprised when Bush won again.

By the election after that I was definitely more invested in the country, and more opinionated about who I thought should win, but also somewhat distracted by the fact that I had just, earlier that hour, given birth. That was a good day all round.

The next time there's an election, if I'm still in this country, I'll probably be allowed to vote in it. I am at the point where I would like to do that. I'd really like to be able to do that tomorrow, even if adding my voice to the clamour of voices in an already blue state wouldn't make any appreciable difference. I'd love to add my voice to those voting yes to Question 6 on the Maryland ballot - to allow same-sex marriage - and I could even have an opinion on questions 5 and 7 as well. (I suppose there might be other questions too, numbered 1 through 4, perhaps, that I haven't heard anything about, but if I was voting I think I'd probably make an effort to discover something about them.)

Mostly when it comes to politics I'm (as a friend said about themselves) an amoeba, but my sixth-grade teacher drummed into us the importance of voting, so I always do, even if I only know enough to know who I don't want. The Irish system of proportional representation is only slightly less complicated (but much fairer) than the US electoral colleges, but over there, so long as I gave the bad guys the last number on my ballot, I felt I'd done my duty.

So that's all I have to say about that. Please go out and vote for the good guys tomorrow, if you can.