By Cody Parish, guest columnist
There’s a political war raging in Washington, D.C. In the arena, we have a mass of politicians blanketing the left half of the bleachers wearing all blue shirts, waving small towel-sized American flags at the hoards of red-clad politicians brimming from the right half of the stands also waving these American flags. Down on the arena floor, President Barack Obama and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives John Boehner (R-Ohio) are sparring with verbal javelins and swords, and I’m in purple watching from my spot on the sand in the corner wondering why there were no seats for someone like me – a moderate American citizen.
Our politicians have shamelessly led the country into a government shutdown – the first since 1995. As a consequence, more than 800,000 government employees are temporarily out of work with furloughed pay. The economy may lose billions of dollars over the course of the shutdown.
Blame is being thrown back and forth like kids in a rock fight, but I’ve yet to see a single politician take responsibility for the fiasco they’ve collectively created. Some friends of mine insist Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and the GOP are the culprits of the country’s political woes, but other friends proclaim the GOP as citizen protectors from the insidious Affordable Health Care for America Act.
The shutdown is an issue of choosing sides and pointing fingers – the pressure to treat it as such is a red herring. It’s not one politician’s fault that our country is in this predicament – all of the politicians are to blame. It doesn’t matter if they’re Democrat, Republican, Libertarian. All politicians serving in Congress failed to do their job. It’s that simple.
But what troubles me more isn’t the incapability of the politicians to compromise, but the callousness with which our politicians make their brash decisions in defiance of political collaboration. Politicians will use anything as a bargaining chip, including the health care law and American well-being. They didn’t care if the government shut down because, as some politicians have stupidly stated, “It doesn’t affect me.”
Hmm, good point. While thousands of people have been forced to put their lives on hold because they aren’t receiving due and earned pay in a timely fashion, some of the people on Capitol Hill still get their big checks and still have their fancy cars and houses. Why are congressmen working under immunity from the consequences of their own ineptitude?
If our government is based on a business model, since we are a capitalist country, and the Republicans support small business, and the Democrats support big business, and it seems like our biggest issues these days are creating an approved budget and the looming debt ceiling, both of which deal directly with money, then it’s logical to say that the government would also run like a business – meaning, if the workers, or Congressmen, don’t perform effectively, then they get fired.
Put another way, these Congressmen represent me, and I represent my employer when I work. If I do an awful job, my employers decide they don’t want me tarnishing their image, and I’m cut. I don’t want these Congressmen representing me, but I can’t cut them from the team. Why is that?! Why do the rules apply to everyone, but the ones responsible for the shutdown, the ones who can’t do their jobs?! Why not put the politicians’ pay on furlough instead of innocent Americans? I’m betting Congressmen would be more willing to compromise if they knew they’d lose their paycheck, too.
What’s most infuriating is knowing Americans will witness plenty of political failures in the future that boil down to the same issues of incompetency and uncompromising ideals.
For years I’ve seen time and again how incapable our Congressmen are when making decisions together. The refusal to compromise within our government has already lost our nation the Standard and Poor AAA international credit rating that we use to take out loans. But what’s worse is the government has lost the confidence of the American people – and the politicians don’t seem to care!
Unfortunately, Americans realize politicians aren’t actively considering them in decisions and are falling into a state of learned helplessness.
I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Breakfast of Champions, for a class, and while discussing the way Vonnegut negatively critiques the American national anthem and conventional American views, the class professor noticed that the students were almost completely apathetic. An international student even commented on how she felt insulted by Vonnegut’s critique, and she’s not even from the United States.
This apathy in our generation of students is not without its reasons. How can people my age feel patriotic when we’re constantly given confirmations of political stagnancy due to blatant refusals to compromise among our political leaders, the ones who make the decisions for us and are billed as our best and brightest on the international stage? It’s hard to be proud of a nation that continues to flounder, that can only move to one side or another, caught in a perpetual tug-of-war. It’s hard to believe in a country that has such gaping flaws.
The problem is most Americans don’t relate with the polarized views of politicians. The moderates have been alienated as Congress has become increasingly radical.
The media and Congressmen have been actively brainwashing Americans into believing there are only two ways of thinking, of being: Democrat or Republican. That’s just not natural. It’s robotic rather than human. The majority of Americans are not identified as either republican or democrat. We don’t think in terms of “eithers” or dichotomies.
Politicians and the media emphasize the extreme political beliefs, but radical views never lend themselves to compromise. It’s a self-defeating notion to think that we can thrive as a democratic nation with two drastically opposing ideological parties at the lead.
Limiting ourselves to purely bipartisan thinking cuts off our motor functions – we can move left or right, but we can never move forward.
Our government is dysfunctional because of its radically opposing viewpoints – it’s a product of itself. Until we elect moderate representatives, the American people will have to accommodate constant reminders of political shortcomings and suffer their consequences, like this shutdown and a potential government default on our loans come Oct. 17. It’s time for a clean slate of politicians.
So far, I’ve sat in my neglected corner spot and managed to make a wicked sandcastle in the midst of this political downslide, but now it’s time to stand up, dust off my shorts, and be a catalyst for change. I’m finally hurling my own javelin.