I'm not sure why everyone is making such a big deal about the shut down. All essential services are still running, and 9 times out of 10 they get retroactive paychecks as soon as the government starts "running" again. People are just bitching to bitch, maybe do a little bit of research before crying the world is ending.
As for the US not taking care of it's citizens, maybe if certain cities and states stopped declaring themselves sanctuary cities/states and actually followed federal law when it came to reporting crimes on illegal immigrants then people could focus more on the legal citizens and less on protecting the illegal ones.