The stories about the veterans of WWII visiting the WWII memorial in Washington DC raise a lot of questions. Why should the memorials at the capitol mall be barricaded simply because there are “too few” federal employees? It is easy to see why the Smithsonian should be closed, but why the mall? Why the open-air WWII memorial? I have implied that this is a political tactic, and I believe that to the extent the Senate and the Whitehouse have influence, they have reason to “fire the police” to maximize the pain of “the shutdown.”

True or not, there is another question. Why should the people who own the parks be shut out? I have heard officials say that there will be no one to clean the restrooms or pick up trash. I say: Why can’t the owners of the parks take up the slack? Are we really so disengaged and aloof that we feel no duty to care for our parks?

When a devastating earthquake hit Japan in 2011, the people there pulled together and persevered. They helped one another, and did not wait for “officials” to do the jobs of cleaning the streets and finding missing persons.

Surely, as a nation, we can step up and take on the comparatively minor burden of safeguarding our parks and monuments, in the face of a mere shutdown. Surely we can keep a watchful eye on the open-air monuments, to pick up trash and try to prevent vandalism and theft.

These are our parks. They are not “owned” by “the government”. When “the government” is shut down, that does not, and should not mean that “the nation” is paralyzed.