Diary of a Furloughed Fed: Day 8 Frustrations

We filled the weekend with apple picking, wine tasting, and cooking with apples--apple butter, tarts and muffins.  It kept our minds off the situation,  allowed us to share time with our also furloughed friend  and got us out of the house into the sunny countryside of Virginia.  However, when Monday came I smacked right into the face of the government shutdown as John went to work and I found myself with time for the laundry and a few errands.  At lunch with Justine and another furloughed friend our talk fixated on what might happen, dwindling resources, and wishing we were back on the job.  It was difficult to talk about much else.  Even though the vote to give up back pay was passed and signed, essential and furloughed people won't get that pay until we are all back at work.  We broke our obsessive talk with an afternoon movie, Gravity, that took us far away from our troubles for a few hours.

People are starting to worry about next month's lease or home payments and starting to live off their credit cards.  I worry as well for them and for our work which is "on hold" as deployment deadlines that affect our ~68 offices around the world slip by.  My small staff of 11 "excepted" people is definitely barely able to "keep the lights on" and hoping a disaster doesn't hit us anywhere. 

I feel we are but pawns in a great battle and must remind myself that it is an important battle.  The Affordable Health Care Act was passed by Congress and declared Constitutional by the Supreme Court -- to not fund it is close to an act of treason by the right wing extremists.  I also believe that if Obama was not an African American their vitriolic hate language would be muted and there would be much less strength in the grass roots population that seem willing to follow the Koch brothers and Edwin Meese to the brink.  Don't they understand that the ACA is benefiting them already?  My girlfriend, a runner in excellent health at 55, was denied coverage and had to live without insurance for over a year because of a comment a doctor wrote on her chart.  Only after she became employed by a firm that provided health care coverage did she get relief.  Today, that would never have happened.  Denying coverage is illegal because of the ACA.  How is that taking away her freedom by the government?