There’s been a lot of things going on in the world over the past month or so and I want to touch on a couple of them, as well as something you really should have on your schedule.

You and everyone in the world has heard about — and maybe even seen — the adventures of Colorado’s U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert, as she and a date took in a production of “Beetlejuice, the Musical,” in Denver.

Joan and I are planning to see the show (maybe even the same cast?) while it is in Sioux Falls.

While the music is fun and lyrically intricate - as almost all musicals are - I don’t expect to be dancing in my seat. Or waving at the security camera on my way out of the theater.

There’s also the continuing story about there being no compromise in sight regarding either a full-blown budget (gasp) or even a continuing resolution, so we simply can limp along to the next impasse.

I thought of that saga as the credits rolled after watching the second episode of the new Ken Burns documentary film “The American Buffalo.” It airs on S.D. Public Television, beginning Oct. 16 and we were afforded a media preview copy.

It is a classic Ken Burns, mixing old photos, with video, written text with voice-over actors and interviews with writers and descendants of those mentioned in the film, all while contemplative music plays. I urge you to set your DVR.

Like nearly every Burns documentary, I enjoyed every beautiful...and painful moment of “The American Buffalo.”

The two-part Burns doc outlines the story of the largest land animal in North America. Buffalo, or ‘bison’ for you purists, once were the largest population of any creature in the central part of what is now the United States. Lewis and Clark, on their historic expedition through the new west after it was purchased from France, described herds of the shaggy beasts stretching to the horizon.

From herds that numbered in the millions, the buffalo slaughtered to near extinction, largely for its hide and tongue, which were sent back to the east coast in railroad cars. In fact, at times, the newly built railroad was stopped on its tracks by herds of buffalo so vast, men leaned out of the railcars to shoot them.

Burns’ film documents the massacre of the buffalo, showing huge piles of buffalo skulls stacked 20-feet high, or valleys covered in the bleached white bones of slain animals.

Tied to the buffalo’s future was that of the indigenous people who had lived with the buffalo for thousands of years. Tribes moved with the herds as they migrated, and they killed animals every fiber was used in some way, leaving nothing to waste.

When the buffalo numbers dropped however, the indigenous people, whose very lives were tied to the buffalo’s survival, were altered. No longer able to hunt the buffalo, the people were placed on reservations and their past as self-reliant hunters gave way to futures where they relied on others.

And it was about that time that their mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. government really began to ramp up, a mistreatment for which it seems the government has immense guilt to this day.

And rightfully so in my opinion. Google the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868.

It was late in the 1800s, when the seemingly endless herds had dwindled to fewer than 100, that a handful of people — some of them hunters involved in the buffalo’s near demise — began to take steps to save this creature.

It’s not a spoiler to tell you how the story ends. We have all driven through Custer State Park, or Wind Cave National Park and seen the huge creatures wandering the prairie hills.

At times, when we lived in the Black Hills, I would drive out to Wind Cave and park near the herd, just to hear the majestic creatures’ deep throated rumblings, sounds loud enough to feel.

Anyhow, what does a film documentary about buffalo have to do with a government shutdown?

Just because you ­can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

Primarily in pursuit of money, with the secondary ‘benefit’ of making the native population more controllable, our ancestors hunted to near extinction this wonderful creature. They did it because they could, and because someone was paying them to do it.

A handful of members of the U.S. House, elected to represent their states’ districts’ constituents, are willing to bring the federal government to a halt, again, just because they can. They may also be getting paid to do so, but that’s a different subject for another day.

People got smart enough to realize that killing off a species — any species — is a bad thing, and took steps just in time to save the buffalo. I wonder how much time we have before someone realizes that this particular game of doing things because you can will be detrimental.

And who will be there to save things then?