A fresh perspective on the shutdown

All right, everybody: Breathe in. Exhale.

Here’s an idea to start your day: let’s take a short break this morning, relax for a moment over our coffee, and stop fretting about all the bad government-shutdown news from the last few days. Some perspective to share: I heard a public-radio host the other night talking with an American correspondent in China, who said officials there have expressed their surprise at the fact that the U.S. government can partly “shut down,” and yet things still work and most of our lives are not hugely affected. They see it as a sign of our nation’s, and our system’s, basic stability.