Early Thursday morning, President Barack Obama signed a bill that reopened the federal government and avoided a default on our nation’s debts. Yet again, a manufactured crisis was solved, and our elected officials can rest easy.
Except — they can’t.
In what’s become business as usual on Capitol Hill, the grand agreement devised by lawmakers simply funds the government and raises the debt ceiling until early next year.
Hardly a solution to our country’s woes, wouldn’t you say?
The president himself announced Wednesday evening the nation must stop governing by crisis, and he’s right. How can our government expect to survive when it decides to operate just a few months at a time?
It’s controlled chaos, and if we continue down this path, eventually the manufactured crises will take their toll, and the rest of the world will grow tiresome of our petty and childish ways.
If the United States is supposed to be an exceptional nation and is beloved around the world for our “freedom,” what in the hell happened to those governing us?
Fear, anger and despair over lost elections guide a minority of our elected officials who in turn subject the entire country to their warped sense of living. At this juncture, their only philosophy seems to be if they can’t win, no one can. No affordable health care, no reasonable or rational policies that might have a positive effect on anyone, no nothing.
If the 2012 election was a referendum on the policies of Obama, he won, and the Tea Party lost. Yet, those on the right refuse to accept the results and instead seem willing to hold the federal government hostage unless they get their way.
Is this truly how we want our government to operate?
We cannot live in the land of opportunity without a functioning government.
Our infrastructure will collapse, the rest of the developed world will view the United States as a “has-been,” and rapid decline of American democracy will start.
Republicans in the Tea Party might think our country can function without government, but tell that to the farmers in the Dakotas desperate for assistance after their cattle perished in a recent blizzard. Tell that to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s furloughed employees, who couldn’t track a salmonella outbreak and feared what might happen if flu season arrived amidst a government shutdown.
Whether you like it or not, the federal government is a necessity, and regardless of the rhetoric spewed forth from the mouths of Tea Party darlings like Ted Cruz or Sarah Palin, this country will cease to exist without a functioning government.
The United States can be a great country, and often times, it has lived up to its billing.
However, unless our elected officials recognize that crises they themselves create are not going to lead to prosperity, they will make America exceptional at one thing: failing to be a model of successful representative government.
If we remain on the path of manufactured crises, pushed mostly by the minority of a minority party, this great experiment in representative democracy might very well be damned.
Whether Republicans want to admit it, Democrats in Congress received 1.4 million more votes in 2012.
Tea Partiers might believe they have the freedom to shut the government down when they don’t get their way, but their philosophy feels far more like a temper tantrum than democracy.
The difference is when children throw tantrums, they usually have an impact that affects their parents and themselves, not the livelihoods of 300 million people.
It’s up to us as voters, Americans and students who want jobs upon graduation to tell the Tea Party, Republicans, Democrats, independents and any others who may claim to represent the will of the American people to cease their endless charade and fix the country. During the last 13 years, we’ve witnessed a contested presidential election, a devastating terrorist attack, two wars, an economic collapse and a nightmarish political situation in Washington.
When will the madness end?
We’re all waiting.
Joel Mendelson is a UF graduate student in political campaigning. His column runs on Mondays. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 10/21/2013 under the headline "The recent government shutdown symptomatic of larger problems"
