Cheers to another fun week of finding the local effects of Washington D.C. happenings. I write this note one week into a federal shutdown that I hope will have ended by the time you read it, even if it makes us look a little out of date. The lesson learned on this story was how many people seemed to believe they could sit back and watch the shutdown play out from some safe distance, like watching a football game from the skybox.
Sure, I took the liberty of a more lighthearted approach to the shutdown story because there don’t seem to be many dire implications in the Upstate, but that disconnected sentiment I heard in casual conversation nagged at me. It’s as if we don’t feel the need to go deeply into an issue until it’s a personal crisis. I’ve seen that with a year of reporting on the Affordable Care Act, where political back-and-forth doesn’t address the underlying problem: People didn’t know how the system worked in the first place. We didn’t know how premiums were figured, or about the wild variations among costs for drugs and procedures, or who was getting covered for what and when.
Now I’m seeing the gap in understanding how federal money flows through our community. All week I noticed when I was driving on a state road, then a federal road, then back on a state (or was it county?) road. I’d idle behind a Greenlink bus knowing it was partially funded by federal dollars, but which part (The wheels? The driver? The fuel?) remained unclear. I thought the shutdown would close our local Small Business Development Center, but they explained that they have a different fiscal calendar than the feds, and anyway had already spent all their federal money and were now operating on state matching funds.
Oh.
There’s no single solution, but I can’t shake the feeling that in our society we often don’t know what we’re talking about. The more integral an issue is to daily life, the less we seem to understand it. It’s good to have experts, and communications professionals to help us out, but there’s a level of personal responsibility we need to acknowledge more often. Sure, we should keep a sane distance from things we can’t directly control, but even the folks in the skybox usually have some skin in the game. They know the rules, at least.
