Well, the government did not shut down last week, and, appar­ently this is newsworthy.

Not only is this newsworthy, the feat has been heralded as one of the greatest compromises in recent years between Congress and the White House. (That is un­til the next day when both sides began declaring victory over the other side.)

The shutdown was prevent­ed only after President Obama, Speaker John Boehner and Sen­ate Majority Leader Harry Reid held a meeting to hash out this “great compromise that almost wasn’t.”

But it should never have got­ten to that point. This country has something called democracy that is supposed to keep closed-door meetings from happening.

All of the partisan bickering created a huge mess that near­ly resulted in the shutdown of the most powerful nation in the world, and that should be unac­ceptable.

Some 800,000 federal employ­ees and all government recipi­ents (this includes Social Secu­rity for readers that think only Welfare people get government funds) waited to see if the gov­ernment they elected to protect them would throw them under the bus because election season is coming up and neither side wants to give ammunition to the other.

The truth of the matter is that the government should nev­er shut down, and it is ridicu­lous that Americans have to wor­ry about such a thing happening simply because our leaders can’t get with it.

What a sad state of affairs we have found ourselves in. How horrible is it that the people of the United States would be made to suffer because Democrats and Republicans cannot even agree on what color the sky is?

This near shutdown of the gov­ernment is proof that the two-party system has run its course. When the people you are elected to serve no longer matter, and the politics within politics are all that do, something has got to change.

Real change, not the “change” candidates tout as a way to rally people to the polls.

Maybe Congress should just divvy themselves into Team D and Team R, arm themselves and have a big street brawl down Constitution Ave. like that scene in “Gangs of New York.”

Maybe then we could elect a whole new slate of legislators who are interested in the people they serve, not the party masters holding meetings in smoke-filled rooms.

It is time the people in Con­gress get over themselves and work together.

More times than not, the an­swers to the nation’s problems are not Red answers or Blue an­swers. They are Purple answers.

The men and women that run Washington, D.C., need to real­ize that and start working togeth­er so that the word “shutdown” is never breathed again.