I am the wife of an air traffic controller at Merrill Field. As everyone knows, we just missed our first paycheck of an unknown number to come. I cannot stress to Sens. Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski enough how detrimental this is to our family and to the families of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
I am angry. I am frustrated. I am sad. The behavior of our congressmen and congresswomen is unacceptable. I cannot stress to you enough how this is affecting our family. We have had to cancel my daughters’ birthday parties because we don’t know how frugal we need to be with our money. We’ve had to cancel volleyball; we’ve had to cancel horseback riding.
We are financially smart people. We don’t rely on credit cards; we pay our bills on time and have saved for rainy-day emergencies. This shutdown is not what should cause us to use our emergency funds. We shouldn’t have to explain to our daughters that we’re cancelling their activities because we don’t know when the next paycheck is coming. To say this is unfair is an understatement. I urge my elected officials to end this disaster.
My feelings on the wall are neither here nor there; that’s not the subject at hand. The subject at hand is that Congress is not doing the job they were hired to do. My husband is still doing the job he was hired to do, with zero money coming in return. The senators need to get the bills voted on in the Senate. Allow our Congress to work the way it was intended.
End the shutdown now. Now. Not tomorrow. We cannot weather this storm as the pawns of a game for much longer without reaching a breaking point.
— Suzanne Mauro
Eagle River
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