Behind the numbers
by K.E. Moore
“It’s okay, daddy. You don’t have to get me a birthday cake. I know you have to save the money.”
It was spring of this year when I heard these words, high pitched, consoling, and almost cheerful, come out of the mouth of my then six year old daughter. We were in the middle of a discount bread store a few blocks from my apartment, a treasure trove of loaves at reduced prices that had become a frequent stop for me and my daughters.
On one of the card tables set up in the middle of the store where boxes of snack cakes and crackers were usually piled high, was a row of simple cakes covered in clear plastic shells. They weren’t particularly appetizing in appearance, and there definitely wasn’t that intoxicating aroma that turns one dumb and hungry whenever they get too close to their grocer’s bakery. But she stared at them with big brown covetous eyes all the same, her features becoming a little guilty when she caught me watching her.
That was when she said it, those small words that will last with me forever. I went a little weak and as our little cart stuffed with four loaves of bread (not fresh, of course, the fresh sticker adds thirty cents to the price), my eyes began to sting. I’m not sure exactly why I wanted to cry even now—the feeling of failure as a father and a provider, or the astounding kindness and self-sacrifice on display from a child so young.
This was in the run up to sequestration, and the possible furlough I might undergo.
See, I served in the US Navy for ten years (9 years and 10 months, but I wasn’t really counting). When I got out, I had the good fortune to be hired immediately by the civilian boss that served as my supervisor while I was still in uniform. It wasn’t the best paying job I could get; I could easily get tens of thousands more doing roughly the same job working in the private sector. But the civilian job kept me close to my kids, close to the place I called home for the previous ten years, and it had stability. That’s the part people who like to malign government workers tend to overlook—there are many talented people who forego large salaries partly to serve their country, and partly because they exchange big paychecks for reliable paychecks.
I worked hard to get where I was, and still do, and not once in fifteen years of service did I ever worry about whether or not my next paycheck was going to come. Until Spring of this year. That was when the furlough scare hit, and I was worried about losing upwards of 20% of my paycheck.
Just a few weeks before my daughter spoke the heartbreaking words at the beginning of this post, we were planning a family trip to a famous water park resort about an hour North for her birthday. It took days for us to go from there to maybe not being able to afford a birthday cake, and none of it had anything to do with my performance at work, or sanity for that matter.
A month later I dodged the bullet. I was placed in exempt status, and I thought my worries were over. I promised my daughters that we would take that trip at the beginning of November, and I even managed to scrape together enough money to get my new seven year old one of those cakes that made her eyes so big in the store.
If I only knew the horror to come.
The sequestration problem was only a warm up. On October 1st, when the House of Representatives failed to provide a budget or at least a continuing resolution to the White House, the government was forced to shut down, potentially putting me out of work. Again, I was designated as exempt from the furlough status, but it has been unclear whether I would actually be paid for the time I came in, or if, like federal employees back in the 1990’s when Newt Gingrich shut the government down on Bill Clinton, would effectively be paid in IOU’s.
I now look fondly back to the time when my only problem was telling a pair of little girls that we couldn’t go on a trip. That was easy. It’s nothing compared to the feeling of uneasy fear that fills my stomach every time I walk into a grocery store, the quiet desperation I feel as I try to figure out exactly how long after the printed date I can stretch this gallon of milk, or whether I can risk getting the headlight for my car fixed this weekend.
It’s nothing like breaking a promise (around my household we don’t make promises unless we intend to keep them) to two little girls that mean more to you than anything else on the planet.
When it was first put into action, the shutdown reportedly furloughed 800,000 federal employees. The estimated loss of wages was in the neighborhood of $1 billion per week, with the projected blow to the economy being more in the neighborhood of ten times that for the duration of the shutdown.
These are numbers I’ve read over and over again, but I don’t think people really get what that means. They’re just numbers—numbers without faces, or emotions. If you aren’t a federal employee, or the owner of a small business dependent upon the custom of government workers, the numbers can’t mean anything beyond the intellectual or the abstract.
Politicians in DC, and the media and blogosphere that cover them certainly don’t seem mindful of that. It’s hard for me to take seriously when Speaker Boehner talks about “Unconditional Surrender,” or even when the President mentions not negotiating with a “gun to his head.” I don’t think when conservative and liberal bloggers alike are, as they so often do, cracking jokes and getting a little too loopy on overly bombastic hyperbole, they are stopping to consider that behind that really big number of 800,000, there are families that go to bed every night praying silently that the madness ends. There are people who work hard and do their jobs well that just want to get a paycheck for what they do. That there are mom and pop shop owners that are seeing fewer people swing by to keep their doors open.
I don’t think, when DC and political media get so invested in themselves, they see the promises broken to little girls, or their fathers who have to beg them for forgiveness. Maybe if they did, we might not be here.
K.E. Moore is a single father currently living in Southeast Virginia. After ten years serving in the military, he continues to work in a support capacity for the Department of the Navy as a civilian. A one time avid progressive blogger, Moore now focuses much of his free time writing novels, playing guitar, video games, and enjoying quality time with his two daughters.