Day Three Hundred and Twenty Nine: Blame

We spend too much time trying to find blame.

Okay, so if you’ve been living under a rock, you might not have noticed the epic government shut down that has been going on for the last…two weeks. Yeah, two weeks of a non active government. Awesome. If anyone else in the world just decided to not do their freaking job for two weeks, you can bet their ass would be fired. Not in our country…they don’t even lose pay.

Don’t worry future readers (as in readers reading about this in the future.) This is actually the third government shut down in my lifetime. Actually, that might be more cause to worry. Anyway, this is the first government shutdown that has the added peanut gallery that is social media.

See, before, when shit like this happened, we only had the facts and the information provided to us by standard and tradition media, like newspapers and television. Which is not to say the internet didn’t exist the last time this happened, but it wasn’t as prolific as it is today. So this time, with the government shutdown (which supposedly will end today? Tomorrow?) we also get every freaking idiot on the internet’s personal opinion on the matter.

What?

If I wanted to listen to a bunch of illiterate, idiotic drabble about things they don’t understand, I would have gone to congress itself! The last two weeks has been a barrage of facebook and twitter updates about “Lol, stupid government” and “Obama sucks” and “Right wing nutbags” (My father got a facebook, did you see?) I’m all for people expressing their opinions, but I feel like we spend too much time looking for blame instead of solution.

I know a person posting on facebook can’t actually help change the government. Not realistically. And I know that the issue is definitively more complicated than it appears and that we may feel we are not in the position to fix the issue since, you know, we’re not those assholes in Congress. But, there are things we CAN do!

The government shut down meant that a lot of programs got cut. Things like Food Stamps and WIC, Veteran’s benefits and some unemployment and disability funds. That means that everyone around you is potentially going through a lot more than usual. Maybe you can’t recognize them, maybe you can’t see them as obviously, but they’re there.

So, until the shutdown is over and until the world is back to normal, maybe help out a little. Contact a local food bank and ask what foods they’re short on (hint, rice and beans. Nobody wants twenty freaking cans of mushrooms.) If you know a veteran in the area, offer to help around their house, mow their lawn or drive them to a doctor’s appointment. If you see someone struggling at the grocery store, maybe offer to help pay for some of it. For god’s sake, just buy some schmuck a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Long story short, stop looking for someone to blame, someone to complain about and contribute. Fifteen, twenty years down the line, when someone asks what you did during the Government Hissy Fit of 2013, wouldn’t it be better to say “well, I donated some rice and beans to the ACC” than to say “Yeah, I totally complained about that shit on facebook!”

Challenge to my Readers:

I already issued the challenge in this post, go ahead and read it again.