Government Shutdown

#GovtShutdown is slightly trending on twitter, and Huffington Post's clever public affairs team jumped onto the frenzy by creating a twitter account called @GovtShutdown.

I wasn't even sure the shutdown was legitimately happening until sometime past midnight when I realized I should take a study break from homework to catch up on the news. Indeed, in the bubble known as academia especially in a small private university, I went about my day and night doing my thing, virtually unaffected from the government shutdown.

Or so I thought.

As a student, the most important thing to me is knowledge. I was doing research on personality and classroom participation and gender on Google scholar and my school's library online database (powered through Ebsco). But a few articles wouldn't open up. The tab didn't change the page. When I opened a new tab to paste the link of the article in, here's the message I received.


So it turns out that ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), an online database of education resource and information, is down because of the government shutdown. It also turns out that some of the landmark articles I wanted to look at for my sociology group's research proposal is available only through ERIC.

I was pretty confounded and needless to say, I thought that the way to get my confusion and surprise out is by posting it on Facebook.

The only articles I could find through a cursory search on Google that talks about databases like ERIC shutting down are mainly through university news postings, and this business journalism website. According to the article, all census.gov hosted websites are closed. The shutdown is happening because of conflict over the Affordable Care Act, which the Republican party voted on 42 times to repeal or defund or declare unconstitutional. So our parents are arguing and we the public are the children in this messy marriage. I hope everything returns to normal soon, because over dinner my friends and I talked about how every other country must be looking at us thinking, "wait, you mean your government doesn't have a backup plan?" "It just shuts down if you can't compromise?" "Governments can even do that? What's wrong with you guys?"

To lighten the mood, Clara (you go girl, being mentioned again!) found this Tumblr http://adorablecareact.tumblr.com/. Ain't it cute?

It’s true. 

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