Government makes the planes fly on time, and much more

Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia

     The American Taxi was waiting outside at 4:15 a.m. It zipped us to O'Hare in 25 minutes. We checked a bag, breezed through security. The flight left on time. The attendant let me take both a stroopwafel and a chocolate quinoa crisp. The plane landed safely at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia. The Uber showed up and deposited us at the apartment, exactly four hours door to door. Our daughter-in-law met us in the lobby with the baby.
      It's nice when things work. This happened two weeks ago. I imagine Friday, with flights slashed 10%, trying to relieve an air traffic control system groaning under the government shutdown, air travel will not go so smoothly. Doting grandparents coast to coast will be stranded in hellish airport lounges while breathtakingly cute babies go undandled.
     Why should this be?
     Much of the federal government has been closed since Oct. 1. This might be time for a little honest talk. Pull up a chair.
     Among the biggest lies in the firestorm of untruth we've been enduring is the palpable fiction that government is bad.
     "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help,'" President Ronald Reagan said, overlooking the fact that he himself was a government employee, and that the citizens whose welfare was supposedly his main concern depend on the government for a spectrum of services. For their mail. To ensure the safety of products they buy and the purity of medicine they take. Often for health care. To encourage clean air and pure water. To appoint fair judges to rule on federal law. To supply soldiers to patrol distant trouble spots. And much more.
     Everyone is on board with the government helping themselves. Those farm subsidy checks are cashed. After every disaster, the emergency aid is gratefully accepted. Yet the specter of other people, people we don't like, also being helped is the soft spot into which the anti-government spear is driven. Our current president began his second term in a blaze of government destruction, inviting an unelected nationalist oligarch to tear apart agencies piecemeal, while hoovering up our private data for his own use.
     Do you know who decimating government helps? Billionaires who don't want to pay taxes. And bigots who quail at the thought of people they hate receiving benefits. That's what the current shutdown is about. Democrats want to extend expiring tax credits that make health insurance less expensive for millions of Americans and reverse Medicaid cuts. That we don't have the universal health care found in nearly every industrialized nation is one scar racism left on the face of our body politic.
     This shutdown does not affect the reign of terror run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, lurching around Chicago with their guns and pepper spray, hunting down preschool teachers.
     The government that should be working smoothly, like air traffic control, isn't, while efforts that shouldn't be done in the first place, like extrajudicial ICE kidnappings, hums along; dogged, thank God, by outraged residents — love to you all — defending their communities, and a pesky legal system demanding that people be treated as human beings, no matter the condition of their paperwork.

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