The Shutdown

It was always the plan.

The leaves are falling without changing, like Congress.

They’re green like dollars instead of the standard gold. They don’t get the glorious dignity of a good-looking death. These are two-day delivery leaves, plucked from the branch by the invisible hand, shot down in the amazon prime of life.

I’m old enough to remember seasons. The way colorful leaves crunched under my feet: the satisfying sound of the reliable march of time. Autumn leaves scattered like crumpled drafts of a chapter near completion. They were absorbed into the soil, and in a few months’ time, earth’s story would begin anew.

Green leaves on the ground are empty pages. They did not get the chance to dazzle and die. They were shut down, like Congress.

I look at the leaves and resent the stolen season: resent it like my generation’s stolen social security and stolen retirement and litany of impending thefts. Stolen country, stolen time. The taking tree.

I look at the leaves and wonder what could have been. I don’t wonder that about Congress. The answer is nothing. When you decide to be nothing, to do nothing, to change nothing, you become nothing. You take everything and you are nothing.

Congress takes bribes, they take vacations, they take offense — they take everything but the heat. They save that for us, so it can scramble our seasons and kill our trees. The heat makes leaves fall too early and ignites fear for our children’s future: This is as much as you will see, this is as far as you will go.

Geriatric millionaires say these are dark days: yes, it’s because we’ve spent fifty years in your shadow. A tyrant rules America while Congress feigns helplessness, practiced in the art, having closed its eyes at every off-ramp on the highway to oblivion.

Congress refused the exits. The American people paid the toll.

* * *

Congress is shut down; Congress was already shut down. Congress shut down in 2016 after spending decades running on dying batteries until the invisible hand yanked them out for good. The mafia state was made plain; civics drowned in corrupt institutionalism. We were told to keep pretending representative government was real.

My mother told me that when she was three, she would sit in front of a blank TV for hours, unaware that someone had to turn it on for the shows to start. That was Congress’s ideal public: a nation of toddlers hooked to useless screens with no agency of their own.

The American public is older now. They’re at that preteen age where they start asking questions. They’re at a preteen age in a country ruled by acolytes of Jeffrey Epstein —the age when you become aware that you are prey.

Europeans like to say American is young country, and we were until the 21^st century, when we each turned one thousand years old.

A government shutdown was always the goal. The premature ending, the stripping for parts, the theft without pretense of duty. The open abandonment of the public good. The apathy at abandonment and the avarice in apathy. The slaying of seasons, the torture of time, the collapse of chronology: when promises turn to premises and premises to pixelated dust. There is honor in real dust: this is not that.

When you are ruled by a technocratic death cult, the concept of leverage changes. A general strike does not pose the same threat to the powerful when their goal is to destroy the national economy. A protest does not have the same impact when officials are devoid of shame. A spectacle does not hold the same power when AI lies are generated with a whisper to a soul-stripping robot. A vote is an illusion when elections lack integrity. Calling your representative is a grim farce when your representative serves transnational oligarchy — and sells it American sovereignty.

The shutdown is a vice grip. Maybe it will end, maybe it is the end game. In 2013 and 2019, I feared it was. But Congress came back, with renewed opportunities to staunch the bleeding, which no officials tried to take.

The powerful want the American people to be shut down, trapped in this time, divorced from the cycles of life. A shutdown precludes possibility and shatters the political imagination. It never lets you move on but moves everything around you with bulldozer ferocity. They want you to watch and wait until that is all you do — until you are again the passive toddler before a dead screen.

I buried a fallen green leaf in the backyard. Not to feed the soil, but as a rite of ceremony. We need new rites when the rites of spring and summer and winter and fall are stolen. We need new rites, we need new rights. In a digital dystopia, commemoration feels like war: a strike against the extinction racket.

I’m a backyard soldier, one thousand years old, laying the stolen future to rest. In Greek, “eulogy” means “good words.” I’ve got nothing left to say, but I said it anyway, and that’s something — that’s something.

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My second-favorite tree in Missouri. Photographed October 2025.

The same tree in October 2018.

My beloved Don Robinson State Park in peril.