Government Shutdown? Not Again!!

Yesterday was for me a fun day.  We had lunch with a couple wherein I have known the husband since I was in high school.  As I sort of contemplated Gene during the lunch where he was sitting next to my husband, it occurred to me that I must be attracted to men who are extremely intelligent, gentle giants.  With that being said, on to my thoughts for this day. 

In thinking about what to write for today of course the situation in Syria came up.  Since I am basically non-violent, but at the same time not aware of all of the issues the President must have to be concerned with, I don’t feel qualified to comment on that.  Just to say I am extremely grateful the decision is not mine. 

The other issue that was of paramount importance this week was civil rights and race.  I remembered once years ago I knew a lady who loved coral colored roses.  They are beautiful, for sure, but that is all she had in her garden.  Now they were beautiful, but also that yard was really boring.  It would have been glorious with even different colored roses, but even more glorious with all sorts of other flowering plants.  It is sort of like the human race.  If we were all light skinned, all over the world, it would be really boring.  (But then who would white people have to look down on?  Joke)  Further, by keeping people of color from contributing their talents to our society, we are short-changing ourselves.  As a nation, and as a people, we lighter-skinned people need to grow up and stop contemplating our own navels.  As the famous Pooh said, “We have seen the enemy, and it is us”, or words to that effect. 

Finally the threat of a government shut-down surfaced in my brain.  All of the government functions that we depend on, but that generally are not forefront in our thinking began to surface.  Imagine wanting to fly away to someplace exotic.  At the airport there would not be TSA people scanning our packed goodies, or reacting to our various replaced joints by then becoming rather personal.  That would be OK for some of us, but there is even something more important about flying that we generally don’t think about.  The federal inspectors who make sure that all of the maintenance regulations on that airplane we are about to get on would not have inspected that airplane.  Could we count on the corporate owners of that airplane to see to it that maintenance was held to a really high level?   

Or what about the federal agencies that oversee our public health?  Would the labs be available to determine whether that person admitted to the hospital had West Nile virus, and thus be able to alert the area wherein the person had been of the presence of the virus?  Lyme disease?  Cholera?  Bubonic plague (endemic in some areas of California)?   

Imagine wanting to take a trip to Yosemite?  Since the Rim Fire is being fought by the US Forest Service, there would not be funding for the USFS.  Would that affect the communities near the fire?  If this winter another massive hurricane made its way onshore either in the Gulf of Mexico or off of the East Shore of the US, would there be any way to fund emergency services to help the survivors?  Or would we have another “heck of a job” moment? 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the federal agency that delivers our weather forecasting.  This service is vital in the mid-west and gulf-states during either tornado or hurricane season, in California during fire season in the fall, in the northern states during the winter.  It is NOAA that sends out tornado alerts, tracks hurricanes, lets firefighters (if CalFire) know, literally, which way the wind blows.   

How about the inspectors who track possible contraband coming into the United States through our ports?  How about the federal agents who track human trafficking across state borders, who track drug imports across our borders, both north and south?   

The list goes on and on.  Any Congressperson or Senator who advocates shutting down the government simply because they have a narrow political agenda of depriving our country of health care reform should be immediately voted out of office.   Any legislation can be improved.  My improvement on the Affordable Health Care Act is simply to take out the age designation in Medicare, and make Medicare available to everyone.  It is a great program that works very well.   

But that is a blog for another day!  Hoping of course that the government has not been shut down in the meantime.