SEPARATION LOST - Alexandra Petri tries to be the government and discovers that we fly together or we crash.

Who’s watching all of the airplanes? I play the simple games for aspiring air-traffic controllers that NASA (not the FAA, curiously) hosts on its website. These games offer all the fun of basic trigonometry, plus an ominous announcement, if you get the math wrong, reading, “SEPARATION LOST”—an aviation reference for occasioning a mid-air collision.

Alexandra Petri takes up a truly excellent idea for an article. The current administration is constantly telling people to do their own research, stare cows in the eye, trust your gut, and then uses that as an excuse to cut an endless amount of services. What do those services do? Petri tries to find out for at least some of them.

There is an impressive amount of work that she must do to cover even the small subsection of the government she tries to understand (not even counting dragging a geiger counter around everywhere).

Petri's writing is, as always, humorous and effective. You should read the whole article. While it is long, that length is effective at getting to the point: the government is needed, these people are doing things for us that we need to stay safe, healthy, sane and live in a country where you can get up go outside and take a walk.

You cannot measure a cow's healthiness for yourself, or predict the weather without data, or have safe and well-taken-care-of public parks--or any number of other vital things--without people, especially not without experts.

She explicitly draws the connection to the Antietam battlefield and the civil war. These are not requests that flow from some sort of philosophical do-it-yourself legitimate ideas of governance. These are people tearing down our government, destroying it. They are destroying democracy and functioning government. They are destroying the vast complicated processes that keep all of us flying smoothly and without which we are increasingly chancing crash. The illusion of our separate self-sustained lives is manufactured and maintained by these processes of the federal government running carefully in the background.

⁠People have tried to walk away from the federal government before. To break it up. And on this hill that I am mowing, some men died saying, “No. You don’t get to do that. You’re in this with us.”

When I think of civil servants in this current uncivil moment—the air-traffic controllers who worked during the shutdown; the NOAA weather chasers flying into a hurricane to measure it, paycheck or no paycheck; the Park Service employees scrambling to keep bathrooms clean despite the cuts to their ranks—I will now think of Antietam.