Shutdown Touches Braintree Founding Father

As Congressional leaders and President Obama prepared to meet Wednesday evening with the hopes of hashing out a budget agreement, the effects of the government shutdown were messing with one of America's founding fathers 450 miles away.

No tours of the John Adams National Historic Park. No trolley service from the National Park Service office in Quincy Center, and a sign in the window of John Adams Birthplace on Independence Avenue, just yards from his native town (it was, of course, Braintree and not Quincy once upon a time).

"Because of the federal government shutdown, this National Park Service facility is closed."

And not even a website to look to for details.

"Because of the federal government shutdown, all national parks are closed and National Park Service webpages are not operating. For more information, go to www.doi.gov."

It is an experience replicated across the country, one affecting millions of tourists and the coffers of every state.

Beaches on the 44,000-acre Cape Cod National Seashore are closed.

As are bathrooms in Fanueil Hall, the Charlestown Navy Yard, the USS Constitution and Bunker Hill Monument. President John F. Kennedy's birthplace in Brookline is similarly shuttered.

An estimated 8,000 federal employees in Massachusetts were furloughed without pay Tuesday, according to the Boston Herald.

Perhaps John Adams himself put it best in the Federalist Papers:

"All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation."