Stateside With Rosalea: Play Big

Behind the checkout desk in a clothing store, a handwritten sign intended to inspire the sales associates pretty much sums up what Washington, DC, is all about: Play big or go home crying. I want to go home crying every night, and not just from the exhausting enervating heat, humidity, and allergy-inducing swamp air of the place. The city is just so full of obstructions.

There are the physical obstructions—sidewalks blocked off so you have to cross the street and back again to walk in a straight line. DC is in the process of being transformed into what journalist and Washingtonian by birth, Sam Smith, calls “the biggest Marriott hotel lobby in the world”. Near the convention center, buildings are boarded up for several blocks in anticipation of a hotel being built there.

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An apartment remodeling worksite takes up the sidewalk and parking on one side of a street that leads to the Convention Center. Boarded up buildings in the rest of this and nearby blocks will be demolished to make way for a new hotel, displacing hundreds of residents of the Shaw District.

But it’s not just around construction sites that you find scaffolding and boarded up entrances. The single most telling piece of evidence that the District of the Dove is now the Outhouse of the Hawks is the J. Edgar Hoover Building, which takes up several blocks and houses the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Built in the early Seventies, it was designed to be safe. And required to have a second floor balcony open to the public so they can use it as a place from which to watch parades going down Pennsylvania Avenue.

You can kiss that idea long-gone. Because of the “war on terror”, all the entrances are blocked off except for one, and even the trees planted along the Pennsylvania Ave side are roped together like Guantanamo Bay suspects. I ask you: With the nation’s civilian crimefighters cowering behind concrete planters and makeshift barriers, who’s gonna defend us against the excesses of the military and those in control of it? I’d show you a photo, but if I tried to take one, I’d probably be dragged off and interrogated as a likely terrorist.

And then there’s the petty authority obstructions. You can’t even take a photo of a building that’s obviously designed to be a visual delight without a security guard being set on you in this town. Such was the case the other evening as an ordinary stroll home turned into a confrontation when I stopped to take a photo of a beautiful staircase and bridge of light on view for all to see through the ground floor glass walls of an office building.

To my pissed-off, “This is a free country, isn’t it?”, the security guard who had told me I wasn’t allowed to take photos replied, “People OWN this building and they don’t want to have any photos taken of it.” Well, far be it from me to suggest the Almighty should get vengeful in his old age, but if those building owners are ever out in nature and get struck by a bolt of lightning while photographing a pretty waterfall, let’s hope they understand why.

However, the obstruction that wears me down most of all are the homeless people. Some beg. Some just lie in a doorway. Some harass you. Some talk to themselves, sobbing and laughing alternately. It makes me furious that people who are not much better off than the homeless are have to bear the burden every day of either sharing what little they have or passing them by and feeling guilty for the rest of the day.

It’s a psychological obstruction designed to keep people preoccupied with not ending up like that; an everyday reminder that, Hey, nothing is certain. A caller in to a morning TV show called Washington Journal summed it up nicely a couple of weeks back. He used the wrong word, but he’d been trying for three years to get through to say his piece and it was heartfelt. “I blame Reagan for all the homeliness,” he said. “It was Reagan who closed down the hospitals and created all the homeliness on the streets.”

Remind me what that was to pay for? Oh, some military thing or the other involving satellites and things that make explosions. See what I mean about the District of the Dove becoming the Outhouse of Hawks? And there’s not a person in this town—in Congress in particular—with the gumption to claw their way back up out of the longdrop and take this country back from them.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE--

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