The National Mall is a big place – blocks and blocks of open grass with a clear view of The Capitol on one end and the Washington Monument on the other. The government shut that down too. Or tried.
They set up metal fence-segments at about 10-yard intervals, clipping on signs that read “This site is CLOSED Do not enter” and proved predictably ineffective.
Tourists hoping the see the Smithsonian museums (shut down) milled about sipping Starbucks and feeding squirrels. A furloughed government employee took his dog on an afternoon walk past the barriers. A few protesters gathered on the Capitol-side, toting signs that read “#ENOUGHALREADY,” “Hey CONGRESS, do your JOB,” and “Your Games are SABOTAGING our ECONOMY.”
But the rest of the shutdown has been fairly effective. Effective enough to leave the metros eerily empty and several Hillsdale WHIP interns without work or very different working conditions.
I’m one of the interns sans an internship. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is considered as nonessential as nonessential can be, so the servers were turned off, elevators disabled, and doors locked.
Junior Mike Bunting is another WHIP student who is furloughed indefinitely. As an intern for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, he was also deemed “nonessential” and simply told to check his email frequently to see when operations have resumed.
“Since the senate has to have a pretty heavy hand in resolving the current impasse,” Junior Ian Fury’s internship in Senator Ted Cruz’s office is on-going, though his hours have been reduced from “all day every day” to “every other day for half a day.” This is part of a strange schedule concocted by Cruz’s intern staff to make sure that one of them is there at all times, though they are no longer en-masse since there are no visitors to receive and they’ve been instructed to send all phone calls to voicemail.
“It’s just a staring competition now,” Bunting said.
And, if this shutdown is anything like the last one — the 1995-1996 shutdown lasted for 21 days — then no one’s going to blink anytime soon.
Fury intends to use his extra free-time revisiting a middleschool favorite video game, Kingdom Hearts, though he had the first half-day shift of Kruz’s interns and has yet to have any excess time off. Bunting has gotten a haircut, gone grocery shopping, and plans to work more at his second job, writing tests for a tutoring center in his hometown of Herndon, Va.
And I have cleaned the fridge, scoured the kitchen, did some laundry, caught up on class readings, and wandered the supposedly off-limits mall.
