The lights are still on. Friday night, Congress reached an agreement to temporarily fund government agencies, buying the time to hammer out the budget this week. It is hard to know exactly what that budget will be, but the American people, particularly those holding federally funded jobs, are able breath a little easier – at least for now.

This last-minute compromise between our severely polarized legislators raises the question: Is this the new normal? In recent months and weeks, there has been a consistent flow of rhetoric from the House of Representatives promising “no compromise” on spending cuts, and an equally reliable resistance against some of those cuts from the Senate and White House.

It seems as though the only thing that forced our lawmakers to withdraw from the brink was the imminent threat of crossing it.

Nobody in Washington seems very pleased with the as-of-yet vague budgetary outcome, which does not bode well for efficient and cooperative congressional action going forward. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that the parties continue to argue over the reality behind the near shutdown.

Democrats are saying that Republicans, a majority in the House but minority in the Senate, were attempting to use the economy as an excuse to pursue radical social agendas through selective spending cuts. Republicans, claiming a mandate from the electorate in the recent midterm elections, say they are simply delivering on their campaign promises of reducing the size of the federal government.

However you approach this budget issue ideologically, the partisans are not talking about the same thing. That is to say, they are not debating one another so much as engaging in a shouting match.

It could be argued that this is nothing new, that all discourse between the parties in the 21st century has been divisive, evasive and generally childish. But the narrowly averted consequences of a federal shutdown sharpen this problem; a lack of continuity in recognized realities is exceeding its usual levels and threatening long-term harm to our limping economic recovery.

Tempting though it may be to allow disenchantment to deepen our national apathy and indifference toward the bickering in Washington, the onus is on us to end it. This state of affairs cannot exist in a nation whose citizens engage themselves in public matters. Different versions of reality cannot coexist when we the people take it upon ourselves to discover the underlying motives behind seemingly nonsensical actions in Washington.

Each side is painting the other to be a villain, and as much as it appeals to our individual political sensibilities to accept such a narrative, to do so would be an oversimplification at best. Last week has shown us that it can be cataclysmic at worst.