Well, it's over. It's finally over. The sixteen-day partial government shutdown of 2013 is over. The Senate and the House of Representatives passed a bill late last night and President Obama signed the bill just after midnight this morning. Many federal employees are back to work today. National parks and attractions, such as the Smithsonian Institute, are open again. The threat of the shutdown's effects expanding even further has been averted. All is well, right? No, not really.
If you think doing things piecemeal is doing things well, then you might say this shutdown was worth it. If constantly delaying issues so that you have to re-deal and re-deal and re-deal with them again and again is doing things well, then you might say the shutdown was a good thing. If you think holding the Congress and the entire country hostage while acting childish is doing things well, then you might say the ends justify the means. I could not, no matter how hard I might try, disagree with you any more strongly.
Just imagine if any of us performed our jobs in the manner Congress has performed during this shutdown. Would any of us still have our jobs?
To be clear, I am happy that the shutdown is over, but that is where my happiness ends. The result and how it was reached is ridiculousness ... and it is ridiculousness repeated. Two weeks ago, my blog posting summarized the government as useless. To expand on my earlier question, any one of us would be considered "unproductive" or "uncooperative" performing at our job in a similar manner, thus likely necessitating our boss firing us. While the term "useless" may or may not be used, we could be considered useless, or at least unhelpful, in terms of achieving the goal of desired productivity. How can Congress be considered useful or even productive when all they have done for the past several years is "kick the can down the street"? Temporary fixes of a few months, six months, or a year are no way to operate well. It is an example of operating poorly. It is estimated that the shutdown cost this country around twenty-four billion dollars ... and this same debate comes up AGAIN in a little more than 100 days.
When I worked at a company that did a whole bunch of temporary fixes as a result of piecemeal decision making, I called it putting a band-aid on a broken leg. In other words, yes, you tried to help, but it did little to nothing to address the bigger problem. The job was in Information Technology and there were a number of programmers working there. Temporary "patches" on a program were not unusual, but an eventual final fix of the issue in question was always sought. The overall culture at this job was putting band-aids on broken legs.
Congress thinks it has an indepletable box of band-aids, while the American people are fed up watching it go to the medicine cabinet.
To call what has happened this time around, as well as all of the other right-up-to-the-cliff moments (i.e. fiscal cliff, sequester, debt ceiling), political theater would be correct. (Have you noticed how they generally keep getting closer and closer to a deadline with nearly each successive manufactured crisis?) Moreover than just political theater, it shows a huge lack of interest in fixing larger problems once and for all. It shows an inability or a lack of desire to solve problems. It shows a culture of abdication.
This culture of abdication continues to be cultivated today by such things as members of Congress still getting paid during this debacle. Their staffers did not get paid, mind you, but the members of Congress themselves did. Since both a sense of duty to follow their oaths and a sense of general decency are in such short supply that they are negligible in Congress, there is no incentive to do better. Nether dutiful carrying out of their oaths nor a sense of decency would require any outside incentive; the incentive is inherently within those things.
It appears that this Congress, as well as its successive predecessors, is unwilling to change for the better. The numbers of those who want to change for better are too few to be persuasive. Can they change? I do not know, quite frankly. Maybe they can, but Congress needs to stop breaking legs and to stop putting band-aids on those broken legs.
Terry
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