At a dinner for the YES Abroad students and Amideast staff on Monday night, it was casually mentioned that the United States government would be shutting down Tuesday. Sure enough, Tuesday came to pass, and eight hours later when it became Tuesday in the Washington D.C., the government shut down. I'm with the majority of Americans when I say that I am angry about the government shut down, but I am the one stuck explaining why it happened to my friends and host
family.
My new friends have asked me a lot of questions about this shut down. Some think that it's because the U.S. ran out of money (Nope, that October 17th's problem). Others asked me if it was Obama's fault (as a democrat and with that little body known as the Senate, I would say no). It is somewhat embarrassing to say that the reason the government shut down is because Congress couldn't agree how to spend it's money. In fact this explanation got it's fair share of people looking at me like I was crazy. Can't Obama just decide? No. It has given me a great example to explain that presidents really don't have all the power they are associated with. In fact, they have less power than Congress.
This latest U.S. news has exposed a hard truth about being abroad, which is, events in your home country aren't as important. It's harder to keep up with what's happening in the United States when your not in the United States. People here don't talk about what's happening in the U.S. very frequently. Here, the U.S. government shut down isn't a huge deal, 9/11 wasn't acknowledged, I didn't find out about the Washington Navy Yard shooting until days later, and I found out about the car chase near the capitol from Senator Bernard Sanders' FaceBook post. It's frustrating to realize all that I'm missing, especially when your John Stewart and Steven Colbert YouTube clips won't load. For now, I am keeping updated and hoping that this shut down ends soon with Obamacare in the budget.
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