Running a marathon is a bourgeois thing to do. Let's face it – people working two jobs to keep a roof over their head and food on the table aren't thinking they need to spend hours every week running to nowhere to get some sense of accomplishment. They are apparently likely to drive by and yell, "run Forrest!" as one random gentleman did just this very morning. I recently had the misfortune of running by a young man who was so offended that someone was running for exercise (or whatever it was I was doing) that he felt obliged to yell at me as long as I was in earshot. I get it. Running is a pretty ridiculous thing to do. It has, like most ridiculous things tend to do, placed me at a strange sort of nexus of the universe.
You see, the marathon I have been training for – the Marine Corps Marathon – winds through Washington DC and specifically through many areas impacted by the current government shutdown. The race organizers have been monitoring the shutdown and have now announced that a final decision will be made by October 19 and that decision could be to cancel the race. Of course my immediate reaction was to pout. Then I regrouped and tried to figure out how to run a different marathon if MCM is cancelled. Then I got pissed off because that was going to be very difficult. You see, even though marathons are bourgeois and elitist, they are also very popular at least relative to their supply. MCM sold out in a matter if hours. Any marathon coming up in the next few weeks will have sold out long ago. So I pouted some more, realized I was being an elitist turd, and got over it.
So how does any of this put me at the nexus of the universe? Well, as we have seen so far, the plight of the people does not seem to impact political decisions but personal impact on politicians does. Sequestration continued as it was originally set in motion until it personally impacted people in the government and the "business types" who fund them. As soon as flights started being delayed or cancelled, suddenly there was plenty of money for the TSA and air traffic controllers.
This is where I have placed my misguided petty hope that I will get to run in MCM – that just one person in congress is running in or is related to and/or schtupping someone who is running in MCM. That is all it would take – just one person out of the 30,000 people currently in a panic about their marathon hopes to also have a voice in congress. I'm not saying that would be enough to end the government's shutdown or prevent it from defaulting on its debt, but it would be enough to make sure MCM happens.
So here I sit with my best hope of running my marathon (a clearly selfish activity) is for the selfishness of at least one politician to outweigh his or her political convictions. Sadly this is probably more likely than the government shutdown ending by the 19th.