When I sit in my study room and watch as a seemingly friendly discussion turns into a heated argument, I think about the current government shutdown. I think about how people in the government cannot cooperate with each other, leading to a total collapse. The shutdown may feel distant, but it affects us more than we know.
A government shutdown occurs when Congress fails to pass funding bills to keep parts of the federal government open. Due to this, government agencies are forced to pause operations, and many public employees are furloughed until funding is restored.
We have all had moments where we were so focused on winning an argument that we forgot the goal was to solve a problem together. That is the high school version of a shutdown. No government agencies close, no workers go unpaid, but the results feel familiar—frustration, wasted time and broken relationships.
At first, it is tempting to overlook this issue as “just another shutdown.” Washington, D.C., feels far away. The arguments within Congress do not decide whether we will have a math quiz tomorrow or whether practice gets canceled due to rain. But ignoring shutdowns means we miss the bigger picture. A shutdown isn’t just about money or politics; rather, it is about what happens when cooperation breaks down completely.
We stop listening because the other person’s view feels too extreme—moments when group projects stall because no one wants to compromise. Even in classrooms, debates can quickly devolve into a question of who is right rather than what is right.
Shutdowns represent more than just financial difficulty. They demonstrate a refusal to listen and the danger of polarization. Those lessons stretch far beyond D.C. They shape the way we interact in classrooms, on teams and in the groups and clubs that define our school life. If leaders in Washington cannot sit in a room and listen to each other, how can we expect to do better?
Polarization can creep into our own communities. For instance, we all have had group projects where two people cannot agree, and the whole project falls apart.
Similarly, the sophomores reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein shows us the dangers of polarization infiltrating our daily lives.
Shelley was not writing about a government shutdown, but she was writing about what happens when responsibility gets abandoned. Victor Frankenstein creates life through his monster, but he refuses to care for it. Victor puts off his problems, and his monster goes on with his life of vengeance, leading to his rampant murders. In the end, Victor was the real monster the whole time, as destruction came from his bad choice and neglect.
Put simply, he refused to take responsibility.
This is what we saw in Washington: Leaders know the cost of their stubbornness, yet decide to shift the blame to the other side instead of compromising. The question is not whether Republicans or Democrats are right, or who is to blame. The question is what kind of citizens we want to be. Do we want to have a nation of constant bickering and endless stalemates? Or can we imagine something better where disagreement creates discussion and not division?
One way we can learn is through reflecting on history. The infamous divide-and-conquer strategy described how ruling powers kept control of their empires by dividing people against each other: breaking up a larger, more powerful group into smaller, more manageable and less powerful factions. By taking advantage of existing rivalries and creating new ones, people would fight each other, thus failing to unite and overthrow the ruling power. The division kept them weak.
Although not the same, this government shutdown has striking similarities to the theory. If Republicans and Democrats are busy fighting each other, they will not challenge and rise up over an overarching system, meaning all the problems in our government will remain stagnant.
Similarly, when we allow arguments and disagreements to get out of hand within a school or classroom, we lose strength as a community.
Politicians exemplify this issue. They deflect blame onto disasters. They weaponize power to cause rifts not just between political parties but between us Americans.
We can either accept that this bickering is just now part of our daily lives, or we can agree to listen to each other. At our school, we can respect ideas we do not fully agree with. In clubs and in classrooms, we can remember that during discussions, nobody came to this school to bicker.
Even if Washington is perpetually stuck in a standstill, we at the School shouldn’t be the same. We are a community, and communities can not survive if we keep fighting each other.
As the divide-and-conquer strategy teaches us, a divided community does not have strength; it leads to factioning. When we listen to others, we learn to value each other and grow as a community.
