As we entered our fourth month without a budget in Pennsylvania, the federal government also shut down.

Jokes about taxation and representation aside, this is obviously flatly unacceptable. Our elected representatives are supposed to represent us — to put our needs, in this case a functional governmental, ahead of their own.

Yet, in this moment in American history, are not our representatives a reflection of our own disunity?

Politics is supposed to be the art of the compromise — the idea that just as pens are mightier than swords, so too are they preferable. Historically, when we lose the ability or desire to talk to one another, bloodshed is usually not far behind…on a historical time scale, anyway.

Instead, what we see of politics today is too often an ugly parlor game of appearances, mirrors and shadow play. What should be clean bills intended to keep governments open instead become warped with poison pills as players of the “Great Game” seek not only to outwit one another but also destroy their opponents — overlooking, we hope, the simple fact that their opponents are also flesh-and-blood Americans, bound together tightly by the cultural cloth of the shared experience of generations.

We hope that this is an oversight — an incompetence — because the alternative threatens the peace and order of our great nation.

What we see, writ large, is an intractable need to disagree — a fetishization of The Other.

Perhaps in this moment, we can achieve some measure of depressing clarity by considering that despite all of our technological advancements, mankind, collectively, is as emotionally immature as ever.

We can go to the moon — but we can’t get beyond our simple, primal need for red to be good and blue to be bad (and vise-versa).

Politics needs to be complicated. It needs to be messy. If it isn’t, then we should grow concerned that we are not being represented, but ruled.

Nobody should get everything they want. However, that is precisely what the rhetoric coming out of our leaders at both the state and federal level suggests: “give us exactly what we want, or we are taking our ball and going home.”

Perhaps it is different behind closed doors — it probably is — but the message this sends to the public is troubling. This message says far less that our politicians are fighting for us, as they may be attempting to portray, and far more that they are fighting against their rivals — and our neighbors.

You see this in many political advertisements, too: “I’m so and so and in Washington/Harrisburg/where-ever, I’ll fight for you!”

You could probably hear that in your head, and we would bet you had the same reaction to hearing it that we had while typing it.

Imagine actually being represented, and not fought over like some kind of prize. But we digress.

Despite it all, many Americans agree on many things. Showing this is one reason that we prioritize running various Associated Press coverage of polls on significant issues.

Some of our politicians, at both the state and federal level, have made careers out of stoking the fires of our differences.

And in so doing — by making the citizenry less an electorate and more a commodity to be monopolized — government dysfunction has only increased.

Keeping the doors open and the lights on should be the most basic function of our elected officials…the most essential of their jobs. Nothing else can happen without that; no productive conversations, no progress on thorny issues, no helping their constituents.

Good representation is rooted in a core belief of wanting to help others. Too many of our representatives have forgotten that fact — if they ever knew it in the first place.