Sacramento professor: The shutdown is a moral failure that harms families | Opinion
As a Sacramento professor and pastor, I wonder if many of us are not grasping the broader meaning of how the political gridlock in Washington has led to a federal shutdown. This cutoff of federal funds for workers and programs throughout the nation is a metaphor for the country’s ethical and sociological failure.
The shutdown is a glaring example of a tragic national culture of indifference. The political maneuvering that threatens to withhold paychecks from federal workers — many of whom live in the Sacramento region — reveals this flaw in our social contract.
Congress’ ability to turn on and off funding shows how a ruling class can treat the livelihoods of workers as disposable pawns. The dismissive narrative dominating national media encapsulates this indifference. And it’s not a new phenomenon: During the 2018 government shutdown, Fox News commentator Charles Hurt asserted that the shutdown is not a significant issue outside of Washington, implying that the rest of the country lacks concern. This callousness is the philosophical core of systemic indifference.
Commentators framed the shutdown’s “most enraging part” as the “uncertainty” it creates for businesses and the stock market — overlooking the financial pain inflicted upon federal workers and their families. The assertion that the pain of the marginalized is irrelevant to the comfort of the privileged is a fundamental failure of moral imagination and civic duty.
But here in Sacramento, we know different. People care about this issue because we are the ones suffering: California is home to approximately 150,000 federal workers who face pay disruptions and anxiety during a shutdown, and many of these families live in the Sacramento region.
Beyond the missed paychecks, the ripple effects are devastating: Vital safety nets are strained, including Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for millions of low-income Californians — often children and the elderly — and essential U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development rental assistance programs that face paralyzing staffing shortages.
In the context of the American political economy, this indifference is a tool of marginalization. We experience this when we deprive a person or community of resources and then hold them accountable for the resulting deficit. This process is one of societal invalidation.
The search for a collective voice
Surviving these chronic systemic failures demands a rejection of radical individualism. Rather than internalizing failure, we must engage in a communal praxis of resistance, whereby lament becomes the public articulation of injustice and protests the enactment of necessary change.
Lament is the intellectual and emotional refusal to sanitize injustice. As a diagnostic tool, it names suffering, demanding a response from a higher moral standard and disrupts the comfortable narrative of the indifferent.
To diagnose our modern political mess, we look to historical traditions of prophetic discourse. While I draw on these sources in my role as pastor, their value transcends religion by functioning as models of resistance and histories for demanding justice.
The book of Isaiah, for instance, provides a unique case study because its response to oppression moves beyond passive spiritualization to defiant, public declaration against the established order: “For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until her vindication shines out like the dawn” (Isaiah 62:1). This is the type of public critique that initiates real changes.
When we articulate our pain publicly, we interrupt the state of silent despair. We saw this communal praxis with the No Kings protest, which drew an estimated 7,000 people to the Capitol’s west steps. Many attendees were there to find community in these bleak times.
It is this search for a collective voice against the bleak feelings of isolation and despair that forms the heart of prophetic resistance.
The politics of reclaiming identity
A primary part of resistance is the reclamation of identity. When a system attempts to label a community as “forsaken” or “desolate,” the only viable response is to seize the power of naming oneself. The idea that dignity is restored through a new naming is rooted in the prophetic tradition.
In his book “Nobody Knows My Name,” James Baldwin wrote that you must define yourself and make the world accept you, not its idea of you. This is an act of political self-determination — a refusal to have a narrative of worthlessness imposed.
Our silence will not protect us, as Audre Lorde cautioned in her book “Sister Outsiders.” To submit to the system’s labels is to accept a condition of political and spiritual surrender. To speak up — through protest and lament — and to declare a new identity is to step into the reality that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. articulated when he wrote that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” meaning that injustice anywhere affects people everywhere.
We must speak up for the nonessential, the neglected and the despised. We refuse to answer the names given to us because of indifference. We use the power of public lament to demand that our systems not just function but function justly. That’s how we affirm our essential human worth.
Jason D. Thompson is pastor of Sacramento’s St. Andrews AME Church, the oldest historically Black congregation on the West Coast, and teaches in the Black Honors College at California State University, Sacramento.
This story was originally published November 6, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Sacramento professor: The shutdown is a moral failure that harms families | Opinion."