Our government has been shut down for the longest period in history.
It didn’t go dark because of a Great Depression or a sneak attack on one of our major military outposts like Pearl Harbor. There wasn’t any catastrophic natural disaster, such as a series of volcano eruptions in the Cascades or the drowning of New Orleans. There was no terrorist bombing at the World Trade Center or an aerial attack on the Pentagon. So why did major parts of our federal government just close? Was it really about building a wall? If it was, then we say we don’t need a wall — we need many, many walls.
We’ve listened to weeks of Washington, D.C., squabbling over the wall at the Mexico-U.S. border. Congress and the president have talked about nothing else. It’s as if there’s nothing else for our highest elected officials to do except wage a pissing match where the real losers are us citizens benefiting from federal services and the government workers providing them.
We noticed when the government is closed that important work does not get done. Food inspections, airport safety, scientific research, parks maintenance, beer labeling and even border security — all are curtailed or suspended.
Maybe increased protection of our borderlands with Mexico is our nation’s top, top priority. If so, where should we list improving health care, funding schools, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, providing veteran’s services, road repairs, wildfire recovery, housing stimulus, fighting opioid addiction, improving access to mental health services, FDA food inspections and finishing the debate over gun control laws?
Before we build a “big, beautiful” concrete or steel post barrier along the 2,000-mile Mexico-U.S. border, we should first build many other walls — as soon as we re-open our government.
We should be building many thousands of walls right here in Sonoma County — walls attached to new houses to replace the wildfire destruction. We should build other walls of more modest stature for families with limited incomes and unbearable monthly rents. We need some walls attached to new roofs for our homeless population. Some of these walls could be new homeless shelters or help centers.
Here and across our nation, we need walls that can enclose critically needed mental health and drug addiction clinics. A real national crisis — where many thousands of people are dying every year — is not at the Mexican border; it is in our heartland, where an opioid crisis is still unchecked.
We’re tired of listening to President Donald Trump and the Democrats hurl statistics back and forth about how many illegal immigrants there are or aren’t. We know this wall debate for what it really is, and we already indelicately pointed it out. It’s a partisan political showdown at the Trump-Pelosi OK Corral.
How many more years will it now take to bring forward real discussions about reforms to our immigration laws? We don’t see that debate happening anytime soon in Congress, do you? Trump’s wall might block some desperate migrants, but updated laws and simplified immigration policies would go much further.
Moving to another point: how is it OK for Congress or the president to actually close major parts of our government? Surely somewhere in the U.S. Constitution it must say the lights must stay on and elected officials must do their jobs.
What if our Sonoma County government was forced closed by our elected supervisors over some snarky political tiff? We’d have to close the jail and let 700 criminals out on the street. Crimes would go unprosecuted, and our roads would go unrepaired. (Would we notice?) Flu clinics would be shut at the height of flu season, and our county parks would overflow with trash just like our national parks.
Everyone knows closing the county government — even parts of it — would not be allowed to happen. So why do we accept the closure of the federal government?
— Rollie Atkinson
