The government is finally set to reopen and resume the basic services we paid for and were denied for over 40 days, but I am not offering congratulations. I'm ticked off. Our elected officials have one core responsibility: to keep the government running and provide the collective services essential to a functional society. They failed miserably. Partisan warfare and a thirst for power have superseded their duty to the American people.
It is inconceivable that the United States of America was forced to ground thousands of flights because it couldn't pay air traffic controllers to keep our skies safe. Unthinkable! It is an abject moral failure that American politicians would allow SNAP benefits to lapse, jeopardizing the truly vulnerable.
The real crisis is not merely the self-serving politicians in Washington. The problem is us. We are the ones electing them. We fail to demand excellence and instead settle for the least-worst candidate, blindly following the "D" or the "R" attached to their name. We get the governance we tolerate. You can say we deserve better, but we don't until we wake up and send better people to Washington.
We are too lazy to form educated opinions and too disengaged to demand a higher standard. We don't demand excellence. We accept mediocrity as long as we don't have to think or participate. We just want to get back to what we think is really important — scrolling on our phones.
While it is easy to be appalled by the politicians involved in the government shutdown, our real outrage should be that our apathy and declining standards allowed this to happen.
What are your thoughts?
I'm Bill Lamb, and that’s my Point of View.
