michelleponders

I have been watching the government shutdown and it was cute at first. Now, it has become beyond ridiculous. Air traffic controllers are not getting their paychecks despite showing up for work. They will get back pay once the government is open again but that does not help the here and now. There is a private citizen giving his personal money to make sure the military is paid. Everyday people who are essential federal workers are now struggling to pay bills and buy food to feed their families. The Democrats can not deny this no matter how hard they try but this shutdown is their fault. And despite trying to blame the GOP for this stale mate, it is backfiring completely on them.

Now this shutdown is going to effect the SNAP program for next month if the government does not open back up and people are coming unglued. Just a brief history of the food stamp program, the Democrats have been introducing social programs since 1935 with the Social Security Act under President Roosevelt. But the welfare state expanded in 1965 with President Johnson. Roosevelt began a food stamp program, Kennedy authorized a new food stamp program in 1961, and then Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act in 1964 which made food stamps a permanent program. This began the true dependence on social programs provided by the federal government. The nuclear family began to unravel and more homes with single mothers began to explode and fathers became unwelcome or unneeded.

It used to be that people helped each other. People sought help from food pantries, which they still do, and churches. The main idea was to keep government small and not become dependent on government handouts. There was also a government commodities program for free items such as blocks of cheese and bags of beans and cans of tuna but that went away or has been redistributed through other government programs. Of course, all that did was make lower income people more dependent on the government for handouts. That in turn caused smaller churches to no longer worry about having food pantries. Church food pantries were then in turn put on bigger churches and even those slowly shut down due to government programs. There just are not as many church pantries as there once was. The Democrats have made it so that people are dependent on the government and not on each other. I remember as a kid my grandparents would trade items from the garden with friends or the excess fresh food from the garden would be canned for winter or traded for items they did not already have. People took care of each other.

The GOP has NOT been innocent in all of this either. The GOP should have been trying to fix this all along and pushing back against the Democrats. The GOP should have raised a ruckus and refused to vote for all these government programs. But the GOP has worried about lining their own pockets by staying in Congress since the stone age, making sure they can always have the lifestyle they have become accustomed to while their constituents struggle. All the while lying to the American people in order to be elected to Congress and turning a blind eye to what the Democrats have been doing all these years. With the exception of a select few, the GOP, aka Rinos, have done nothing.

It’s certainly time for a huge change in Congress. No matter which side of the aisle you are on, or what your beliefs may be, I think we can all agree it is time for new leadership in Congress. This is also another great argument for term limits. When politics becomes a career, corruption runs amok. And this issue is only a small part of this latest government shutdown. There is more but I will need to make more posts. We must help each other again, from growing gardens and sharing food to making families the central hub of life. Fathers need to be the leaders they were called to be and help raise their children. The government should not run our homes and make us so dependent on their programs. We must go back to a hand up from each other instead of a handout from the government. This shut down is a proof that our government has become too big.