I Know The Sad Kid At The Zoo

The Little Boy Who Became The 'Iconic Image Of The Shutdown'

I saw the picture the way we see so many things on Facebook – a quick glance, a quick judgment. Blink. It was a picture of a little boy, seen from the back, standing on the fence outside the National Zoo, under a sign that reads “Zoo Temporarily Closed.” I noticed it because the little boy looked about the same age as my little boy, and we live close to the zoo, and the zoo’s closure has been, in our household, the shutdown’s most concrete manifestation. So I thought about linking the picture on Facebook, as being expressive of our shutdown experience, and then decided not to, and moved on.

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