First, a tip of cap to Utah’s guys in Congress who sacrificed their paychecks during the shutdown: the Wasatch Back’s representatives in the House, Blake Moore and Mike Kennedy, along with Sen. John Curtis.
They and the people who need services like SNAP and WIC suffered more than the vast bulk of us over the 43-day length of this one, the longest yet.
The shutdown stopped once the airports started to get a little inconvenient. That’s about as much pain as most residents might endure, which is to say the vast bulk of us didn’t even notice.
Just imagine if local government were to shut down. Schools, cities, police, fire. We’d understand that as immediate catastrophe, our lives utterly disrupted.
It’s also a clear signal of how wacked our priorities have become and where we focus way, way too much of our political attention.
The issues of the nation and doings around the world are huge and important, sure, even if we ignore the biggest and most intractable ones in favor of junk like gossip over who was or was not pals with the president at critical moments.
I have family and dear friends triggered red and triggered blue and blowing up over every little thing, dopamine and cortisol flowing just as much as the social media juggernauts, Substack savants and cable TV networks could ever want.
We live in a middle band of attention to stuff that matters, sure, but isn’t really all that critical. Other than expressing the right slogans for our tribe, we don’t think much about climate change, the arc of AI, global trends in governance, the larger implications of human overpopulation or the future of energy, food, war, education, information and so on. We give as little thought to what really matters up there in the stratosphere as we overlook the very basics down here where we live our daily lives.
We’re going through a drought in wisdom and perspective as we dumb down while the world heats up. Humanity has known about climate change through greenhouse gas emissions since around the 1850s, by the way. Long time to ignore the obvious.
My real window seat is watching and covering our local life as editor of community papers, sometimes appalled at the utter lack of knowledge combined toxically with let’s say a surplus of opinion from folks who should know better but can’t keep their facts straight and care even less about something so mundane as reality. Something so basic as accuracy and primary evidence is no salve once we’ve made up their minds. We’re allergic to being wrong about, well, anything. It has gotten worse in my career.
The triggered ones, today more than ever, have picked a tribe painted red or blue, or any collection of us and them, really, and ride with that instead of thinking through each item, each issue, each documented history. Life is complicated, confusing, and we’re so insignificant as individuals in such a fractured society while instinctually driven to belong. Besides, there’s TikTok or Facebook or X to keep up with, all those quick hits, some as likely as not to be true, surely.
The secular has slipped into becoming its own scripture, that fiction of infallibility that at least feels more secure. The less immediate the consequences are for being wrong, the more we believe in our own BS. That’s my theory of the moment.
And so with something like a big federal shutdown, we sound off, sure. But we don’t feel the impacts, not really. A relatively few families go without food. A few friends holding jobs not among the president’s favorite go without paychecks. Few of us in Summit or Wasatch County are targets of ICE. It’s all safely remote for the large majority.
Our fury carries the aspect of hobby, then. Wave a sign, honk a horn, shout out slogans with the like-minded. Maybe at heart it’s kind of fun to go off.
Our comparative attention to the affairs of the city is wavering at best. A few show up if their neighborhood might have a development next door. Or if plans begin to emerge for building up a town center. A few more fire up if fees and taxes are about to rise, but way, way more will only wonder later what happened — after the bills arrive.
For the occasional nonsensical conjuring of conspiracies that crop up during election seasons, local government works relatively well. Enough so we take it maybe too much for granted.
A local government shutdown would snap us to attention on day one, all right. Which can only mean we’re pretty well served. Citizens can get away with not watching so closely as perhaps they should, confident the news would be immediate should something begin to go that wrong.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.