The Shutdown Won't Really End

A voice of sanity in the noise?

Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

Around the same time that tens of millions of Americans faced acute hunger, as lines stretched into parking lots at food banks, Target decided the real problem was that their employees weren’t smiling enough. Like Walmart, they’re going to make their workers smile, wave, and make small talk with customers in order to boost sales. It’s probably the most American thing I’ve ever heard, responding to a year of crisis and hardship by telling everyone to smile more.

So, the shutdown is coming to an end.

Is it, really?

In some ways, it always felt like this shutdown was doomed to succeed. I’m not the only person to point this out, but MAGA Republicans wanted it. You can’t use a government shutdown as leverage against a group of psychopaths who planned on taking advantage of it to further their own objectives. And that’s exactly what the authors of Project 2025 wanted. They wanted to starve Americans. They wanted to disrupt airports and supply chains.

Destabilizing the government makes it easier to take over.

Still, it was somewhat admirable to watch Democrats standing their ground for once. Alas, the shutdown didn’t stop this corrupt administration from buying themselves private jets and planning invasions of foreign countries.

See, the brutal machinery of fascism, capitalism, and colonialism strides on regardless of what happens in D.C. A lot of ICE agents just love riding around pointing guns at people, and they’d do it for free.

So they did.

Of course, by caving on healthcare, Democrats sent a powerful message to their fascist opponents. They’ll back down.

They sent an even more powerful message to Americans, that their government is broken, regardless of whether it’s “open.”

Maybe we can take a little solace in knowing that some basic social safety nets will return, but for how long?

Until the next showdown, I guess.

Ask yourself the difference between a government that’s shut down and a government that’s broken. Ask yourself the difference between a government that lets millions of Americans die from hunger and one that lets them die from preventable diseases. The fact that we could debate that says a lot. At some point, the differences will dissolve for all the families out there who need medicine.

Today, our government is making millions of Americans choose between medicine and food, when they need both to live.

We’re on the fast track to a government of warlords that takes our money and spends all of it on bombs and guns. We know where that kind of thinking leads. Look at all the failed states out there, states we helped collapse. It looks like the oligarchs have run out of states to strip for parts. Now, they’re taking all those tools and putting them to work on our own government, dismantling it, shutting it down, rebooting it, and so on, until there’s absolutely nothing left.

They want to work us to death. They want us delivering packages and running fast food restaurants and theme parks during hurricanes, floods, fires, and tornadoes. They want us to spend thousands of dollars on AI girlfriends and chatbots. They want us to live in poverty, sickness, and loneliness.

And they want us to smile.

It helps them sleep.

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This publication will continue as “Your Local Cassandra” for everyone who wants to stay here on Substack but still read all my gloomy doomy prose. I’ve found some spreadsheet tools that will help manage any confusion.