My old job was in Foggy Bottom, one block from lobbyist-heavy K Street and four from the corruption-tainted White House. Each day I battled hurried yuppies and ostentatiously badged government workers on the Metro, walked past luxury high-rises, pausing at the Watergate while Condi's security convoy escorted her to work, buffeted by Ann Taylor sweater sets and Brooks Brothers suits hustling by on their way to lobby for change and manage money and write laws. On special occasions my colleagues and I would lunch at Legal Seafood, downing Sam Adams and listening to the hushed rustlings of greed, of power, of self-importance. We would hit the diviest dive bars we could for happy hour, in an attempt to avoid rubbing elbows with rolled-up blue oxford sleeves and loosened school ties. I bought into it, too, finding myself puffing just a little when I would too-casually tell someone "I work in The City."
My new job takes me a bit further into the same city. I crank up Dylan or maybe the Dixie Chicks and (if I'm lucky and traffic's light) fly past the monuments and up, up over the bridge past the Capitol gleaming with hope and promise in the morning sun. Traffic backs up here and I inch down the ramp towards the tunnel, passing under the lane designation signs: "The House" and "The Senate/Mass Ave." This is where it all happens: this is where the country is run. Now I'm under the city, travelling directly beneath the bustling busy expensively suited lawmakers and aides and lobbyists and filibusters and briefings and scandals. When I come up out of the tunnel, I'm still in DC, but things are different here, here in my new part of town. (Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad! Stop reading!)
I'm not going to make it out to be worse than it is; I'm not driving onto the set of Boyz From the Hood. It's daylight, and there are commuters crowding the road, and school buses trundle by and the huge newspaper building rises up stark and solemn and gentrified over it all, crawling with security guards. But there are liquor stores, and halfway houses, and mission groups. Glass bottles litter the gutters, and the windows are barred and the buildings are run down, drooping, dulled. It's not a place I'd want to be at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night, or, really, any night and I'm grateful that the latest I ever have to stay is 8 p.m. and by then the roads are clear and I just zip right down into the tunnel and out onto the freeway. I'm grateful for the night desk guy who likes to teach me cool handshakes and doesn't blink when I ask him to walk me out to my car on those weekly late nights. Most of all, I'm grateful that I don't live here.
I've lived in Arlington and worked in DC long enough that I hardly even notice the towering monuments, the stark solemnity of the Pentagon, the graceful beauty of Arlington Cemetery. It's just like when I lived in Charlottesville and couldn't understand why people came from all over the country to see Monticello (the novelty wears off after the third field trip), or when I went to W&M and scoffed at the tourists vacationing in Colonial Williamsburg. But I've been noticing DC lately, on my commute. I've been noticing the Capitol and the executive buildings and the landmarks. I've noticed that, when I'm not in rush hour, it only takes me 18 minutes to get from my house in Yuppieville, through the seat of government, to the edge of poverty. And I drive slow, like a country girl lost in the big city.
I can understand why the government seems so out of touch with what's going on in the rest of the country. DC is its own little compound, an enclave of money and power puffed up on self-importance and high-minded theory and utterly oblivious to the day-to-day lives its constituents lead. It's an hour's drive to the closest small farm, so I can accept that the administration may not be able to empathize with small farmers crushed under the weight of corporate agriculture, selling off heads of cattle and wondering if they'll have enough to see them through the winter. But I cannot understand how the machine grinds on, pouring money into endless wars, cutting social programs, bumbling educational policy, widening the gap between those that have and those that steal, when the evidence, the effects, are literally sitting right outside the windows of those fancy Capitol Hill offices.
How do you turn a blind eye to the poverty and violence and despair in your own back yard?
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3 comments:
My father and I were just talking about this very thing yesterday. Burns my shit up.
Take Las Vegas -- the city that rich dummy money built. I teach in some of the most gut wrenchingly poverty-stricken areas in town. It has become increasingly more clear to me that nobody gives a damn about these kids. Why? Because in order for capitalism to work, there has to be a permanent underclass.
Our government -- this system -- is invested in keeping certain people poor and hopeless.
Is there truly a gov't that is designed to work effectively for everyone?
At some point every civilization is going to have those individuals that just can't be helped by the system. That is where the individual comes in. I mean both the person who is downtrodden and the person who has the ability to help. No one side can do it all.
-Joe
PS.no spell check, so please forgive..
I contemplate this whole thing pretty much every day, as I walk into my office with my sunglasses and laptop case and cell phone and nice coat, and walk past 20 people who will probably never be able to afford a car in their life. I think about it when I drive past the homeless guy on the way to the bar--is it a better use of my $50 to get tanked or feed someone? Unfortunately, I haven't made it much past the contemplation stage...
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