I was driving my daughter home from a birthday party this weekend when she heaved a heavy sigh and groaned, “When will this shutdown end?!“

I chuckled and asked my 13-year-old, “How, in any way, are you being affected by the government shutdown?”

“Because I’m a human being with compassion for other people I’ve read about in the news, who can’t buy the insulin they need to survive, for example, because they’re not getting paid…Because I feel terrible for people who desperately need their paychecks for things like food, or to pay their rent or mortgage…”

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne