What’s So Bad About the Government Shutting Down?

When I was a kid growing up in D.C. in the 1950’s, one of my neighbors was a black man who worked in the USPS headquarters building downtown. I later found out that this man had been the only African American to command a warship during World War II, which was a submarine tender with a crew of 60 which was in the South Pacific battle zone.

I also later learned that this man had gone back home to Richmond, VA when the war ended and the best job he could get was as a mail carrier, walking around some neighborhood in Richmond, door-to-door, delivering the mail.

When Harry Truman prohibited discrimination in federal employment after 1948, this man moved to D.C., briefly worked for USPS, then went back into naval service in 1949. He retired as a Vice Admiral in 1980.

How many millions of black men and women were deprived of the opportunities that this man enjoyed over the course of his life? How much did the United States forfeit over more than three centuries because blacks didn’t enjoy the same legal and socio-economic opportunities enjoyed by whites?

A recent study has put the loss of income to blacks at more than $70 trillion since Africans were first brought to this country as slaves. But what about the cost not to the black population, but to the country as a whole? How many other…