Ladies and gentlemen, things are far worse than we expected. With the shutdown of the government it appears that peoples’ respect for law and order has disappeared entirely. After paying park employees to barricade monuments in Washington some veterans became displeased and decided to, get this, bypass the barriers and visit one of the monuments anyways:
WASHINGTON — Wheelchair-bound elderly veterans pushed aside barricades to tour the World War II Memorial Tuesday morning, in defiance of the government shutdown which closed all of the memorials in the nation’s capital.
The four bus loads of veterans — visiting from Mississippi as part of a once-in-a-lifetime Honor Flight tour — ignored National Park Police instructions not to enter the site as lawmakers and tourists cheered them on.
“We didn’t come this far not to get in,” one veteran proclaimed.
Oh the humanity! Didn’t they get the memo? The government is shutdown and that means the monuments, which require to manpower to staff, are closed.
Seriously though, good on these men. This entire shutdown fiasco is insane. The government has actually invested a great deal of resources into shuttering parks and monuments just to make a pointless case about how much we need the government. In addition to paying employees to shutdown mostly unmanned parks and monuments the government has also paid system administrators to take down content from automated websites and replace them with noticed informing people that the website will be unavailable for the duration of the shutdown. More people should follow the example of those World War II veterans and tell the government where to shove its barricades.