O pinion
THE VIEW FROM HERE
Waking Up to a Different World
BY JOSHUA RUNYAN
IT’S A TRUISM of life that
you never really know what
you had until it’s gone. (That’s
not exactly true, as more than
one person has noted that the
saying really means that you
always knew what you had,
you just didn’t realize that you
could lose it.)
It applies as much to interper-
sonal relationships as it does to
physical possessions: Sometimes,
you can’t really appreciate some-
thing until its effects linger in
a kind of relief, the something
having already disappeared.

More often than not, the
realization produces feelings of
remorse. This will certainly be
the case in the coming days
and weeks when we collec-
tively as members of the Jewish
community of Philadelphia —
joined by everyone else who
call Southeastern Pennsylvania
home — ponder the greatness
of philanthropist Raymond
Perelman, who at the age of 101
departed this world on Jan. 14.

His beneficence extended
not only to such institutions
as the Jewish Federation of
Greater Philadelphia, the
National Museum of American
Jewish History, the University
of Pennsylvania, Drexel
University, the Kimmel Center
and the Philadelphia Museum
of Art, but it also enabled gen-
erations of Jews to explore their
heritage and better their souls.

He will truly be missed.

More generally, feelings of
sadness following loss are far
from guaranteed. More than
once, in fact, I’ve gone outside
during a neighborhood-wide
power outage not to mourn
the loss of air conditioning
but rather to marvel at the
serenity of the world when
electricity and the noises its
use produces are taken out of
the equation. (Many people
reported similar feelings when
the enormous tragedy of the
9/11 attacks led to the closure
of America’s airspace and the
grounding of civilian aircraft
for three days.)
If reporting in The
Washington Post is to be
believed, there are more than
a few who are hoping for some
positive effects from the sud-
den disappearance of govern-
ment paychecks and certain
government services.

More than three weeks into
the longest federal government
shutdown in U.S. history, the
theory is that among a cer-
tain set of small-government
conservatives who have been
railing for decades on Capitol
Hill and in the White House to
cut spending on social welfare
spending and the administra-
tive state, 800,000 government
workers not getting paid isn’t
necessarily a bad thing.

Their motive, according to
the article, isn’t so much the
building of a wall along the
nation’s southern border with
Mexico but rather the long-
term contraction of the federal
government. Yes, Congress
and the president last week
agreed to provide back pay
to workers who have gone
without since the shutdown
began, but one of the effects,
say observers, is that fewer
people will seek government
jobs in the future. Faced with
the uncertainty of perhaps an
even longer shutdown loom-
ing in the distance, the think-
ing goes, they’d rather be
employed in the private sector.

That may or not be true, but
let’s ponder for a second what
the contraction of government
has meant in the short term. In
the first days of the shutdown,
many of us were despondent
over the closure of national
parks and monuments, but
unless we were used to col-
lecting checks from the U.S.

Treasury, we didn’t have a vis-
ceral appreciation for what was
going on. Two weeks after the
shutdown began, I noticed that
security lines at Philadelphia
International Airport were no
longer than normal.

That’s not the case now.

Tasked with essential jobs that
meant they’d have to work
through the shutdown but not
get paid, Transportation Security
Administration screeners across
the country have called in sick.

The resulting slowdown has
affected air travel.

In addition to working
without pay, air traffic control-
lers employed by the Federal
Aviation Administration are
ensuring separation between
aircraft without the benefit
of support personnel. FAA
inspectors responsible for
ensuring the safety of air-
frames, maintenance programs
and pilot proficiency are largely
house-bound, the agency now
relying on “risk-based manage-
ment” to decide who to employ
— again, without pay — on any
given day.

Maybe you don’t travel
much. Do you invest?
Much of the Securities and
Exchange Commission is fur-
loughed, meaning that over-
sight of the securities industry
is a shadow of what it was before
the shutdown. Companies’
initial public offerings have
ground to a halt; there’s no one
at the SEC available to approve
their applications.

The fact is — and it gets
worse the longer the shutdown
goes on — everything from the
administration of federal courts
to criminal investigations is at
stake. Food inspections, energy
infrastructure oversight, acci-
dent investigations, certain
home loan approvals — these
are all at stake.

Can government do its job
more efficiently? Certainly.

Does this country need a last-
ing solution to border security,
immigration abuse and the
plight of undocumented work-
ers? Absolutely. But inaction is
not a solution. It’s actually been
a detriment.

Most people, whether they’re
blue collar or firmly ensconced
in the “1 percent” fail to appre-
ciate all of the government pro-
grams and initiatives they’ve
relied on through their lives.

Just imagine what things would
like if you woke up one morn-
ing to find every bit of that gov-
ernment support gone. l
Joshua Runyan is the editor-
in-chief of the Jewish Exponent.

He can be reached at jrunyan@
jewishexponent.com. Crackdown in Xinjiang — the Islamic World’s Achilles Heel
BY JAMES M. DORSEY
A DISAGREEMENT between
major Indonesian religious
leaders and the government
on how to respond to China’s
crackdown on Turkic Muslims
raises questions about the
Islamic world’s ability to sus-
tain its silence about what
amounts to one of the most
concerted assaults on the faith
in recent history.

16 JANUARY 17, 2019
Rejecting a call on the gov-
ernment by the Indonesian
Ulema Council, the coun-
try’s top clerical body, to con-
demn the Chinese crackdown
on Turkic Muslims that has
seen up to a million Muslims
detained in re-education
camps in China’s northwest-
ern province of Xinjiang,
Indonesian vice president Jusuf
Kalla recently insisted that the
government will not interfere
in the internal affairs of others.

The disagreement could
take on greater significance
after the elections in April,
which incumbent president
Joko Widodo is expected to
win. Widodo’s vice presidential
running mate, Ma’ruf Amin, is
the Ulema Council’s chairman.

Since joining the ticket, Amin
has retained his Council posi-
tion as non-active chairman.

Nonetheless, Kalla’s posi-
JEWISH EXPONENT
tion is in line with that of a
majority of Muslim countries.

Eager as they are to attract
Chinese infrastructure invest-
ment, those countries have
opted to remain silent on the
crackdown in a bid to avoid
jeopardizing relations with the
People’s Republic. These same
countries have responded
angrily to far less threatening
incidents, such as the con-
demnation of British writer
Salman Rushdie for his novel,
The Satanic Verses; the car-
toon depiction in Denmark of
the Prophet Muhammad; and
the burning of a Quran by an
American pastor.

In a similar vein, Mushahid
Hussain, chairman of Pakistan’s
Senate Foreign
Affairs Committee, said the cardinal
principle of Pakistan-China
See Dorsey, Page 18
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM