Jackson Free Press

The federal government was able to avert shutdown. Whether or not you actually believed it would happen, it stands to reason that all of us should take pause at how close a shutdown actually came. About an hour before the deadline, lawmakers finally agreed on a compromise. This raises the timeless query on whether the true needs of the people sometimes get lost in partisan politics.

A shutdown would have meant hundreds of thousands of federal workers would have been sent home. National Parks and federal agencies would have closed, and our military personnel would have been working for free. In the end, they were able to agree on nearly $80 million in cuts below what President Obama had proposed.

As this drama unfolded before our eyes, Democrats and Republicans made like two cliques on opposite ends of the playground, each trying to convince us that their side was the "righteous" one, that their position was the one best for America.

Republicans say they want to work with the President. They want a health-care bill, they want more jobs, they want clean air. But they want to do it by leaving money in the hands of business owners and hoping it trickles down to the rest of us. They want to severely cut programs that assist the less fortunate of us to sustain, primarily education.

With only moments left before the deadline, the Repubs dug in on Planned Parenthood, saying they won't fund abortions, despite the abundance of information to the contrary. We danced shamefully close to the Smithsonian closing its doors because Rep. John Kyl erroneously stated that abortion makes up 90 percent of Planned Parenthood's services. Another Republican said that PP existed to "help kill black babies before they come into the world."

Come again? We're not going to fix what's ailing America by resting the blame solely on the backs of this country's blue-collar workers, poor
and disenfranchised.

Let's be clear: Democrats cannot absolve themselves of blame, either. When they had a large majority in Congress, they failed to pass a budget. Any good card player knows one thing: When you've got a hand full of spades you don't waste time holding them. With a prime opportunity in play, Dems should have been trying to get the agenda instead of trying to simply keep their seats. Party leaders felt they had a better chance of getting elected if they didn't do anything "controversial." We all know how that turned out mid-term don't we?

Dems elected to kick that "budget can" down the road, and that decision almost led us to a government shutdown.

Then there's the Tea Party, which, like them or not, has an agenda and makes decisions based only on that agenda. They pushed Republican compadres into a corner where they couldn't compromise. Now that they have, some Tea Party members say they will get rid of Speaker John Boehner in the next election.

For you and me, it seems "politics as usual" has become the "politics of conflict." One side is spending so much time trying to figure out how to "one up" the other that nothing gets done. And the trail it leaves is a tragic one: kids going to school in failing school districts, with parents who are part of the stifling unemployment numbers, preventing them from having viable health insurance.

The cycle continues because we allow the two-party system to dominate—two sides that profit from telling us why something "can't" happen instead of working on the reasons it can. If we, as voters, don't get a clue, we'll continue to fall for this ruse.