General Discussion

You said it all far better than I've been able to.

My niece is an air traffic controller. She and her husband and two kids ages 2 and 4 live in northern Colorado. She's been working six days a week without pay. She took a day off the last week in October to see if she could get a loan to tide them over and figure out which bills they could put off paying. Some they couldn't afford to postpone. Heating and electricity is a requirement in their climate, along with food for them all. They deserve to have a Thanksgiving and Christmas. They did not volunteer to go through all of that.

I wanted to send them an e-gift card to help, but had just sent one to my disabled friend who was rationing food because she needed to save her money for rent and utilities so she wouldn't be evicted. She has only $967 a month income from SSI. Even though in Texas the amount of SNAP benefits were reduced, at least they've finally started back up.

Another large group that was suffering during the shutdown were all the government contractors. They don't get made whole during a shutdown. There's no safety net, no laws requiring back pay. They will be digging out of the hole for months. Some may lose their homes, face eviction, and even lose their marriages as loss of income is hugely stressful and that along with anxiety often results in couples cracking under the pressure.

As a retiree, my expenses are less than those of young working people. My kids are grown and have their own lives and income. Like most at our time of life, we no longer have the need to purchase lots of things, including clothing for growing children. We already have our furniture, appliances, and so forth. So we can save more easily than my niece and her husband can at their time of life. That allows us to be more resilient in a shutdown than younger adults. It would still be hard for us to go 40 days with no income, and live in that level of uncertainty and terror.

If we forget our values, like kindness, compassion, empathy, courage, truthfulness, justice and mercy under the stress caused by Trump's cruelty, we start to become like him and the MAGAs. In the work to overcome authoritarianism, it's critical to maintain the values that support democracy. That is a key point made in Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century: "Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it."