My fifteen year old son is getting a civics lesson this week. As new residents to Minnesota, we love the trees, the lakes, the relaxed style of middle Minnesota. My son turned fifteen the end of April, but since we were moving, he didn’t get his driver’s permit the moment he turned fifteen like many of his peers. Once we moved, we immediately signed up for a two-part driver’s ed, which he has diligently attended for the last two weeks.
Yesterday, I picked him up after his final class—the one with the test. His smile told me all I needed to know. “How did you do?” I asked.
“Best score in the class,” he beamed. But his smile faded. “But I can’t get my permit to start driving because of this effing government.” We won’t let him use the full f-bomb. I know we shouldn’t let him use the abbreviation, but oh, well. No one’s perfect.
I know a driver’s permit is inconsequential in a state government shutdown. Women’s shelters just lost an appeal to remain open. State workers are without a paycheck. Families’ lives are set on the uncertain edge. But my son, my youngest, suddenly gets a lesson on the stupidity of our leadership—supposed adults—who cannot sit down together and work out of good-faith compromise.
We’re a liberal family, one born of two blue-collar kids who went to college, got married, had kids, worked hard, and have been far more successful than we imagined. We’re not the top 2%, but we’re pretty close, and every April 15th I remind my husband, who for full-disclosure, makes a whole lot more than his public-teacher wife, that we pay our taxes with a smile. We must reciprocate to the next generation for the opportunities given to us via Pell Grants, student loans, a brief stint on Medicaid, and all the other benefits we have used. Our goal as parents have been to make our kids’ lives better, fuller, brighter than ours were.
And so we watch our son suddenly watch the news, looking for the compromise that will end this shutdown so that he can do what most kids his age want to do—get that piece of paper that begins the process of earning that next level of freedom and independence. He goes ashen when prognosticators say it might be more than a month. I gently remind him that there are folks who are being harmed far worse than he, and he gets it—as much as any fifteen-year-old would.
