“I think we can agree; the past is over”
– George W. Bush
I’m thinking of the first and last times that I’ve been to DC. The first time was in late January 2009. Several of us flew out from Seattle into Virginia in the late evening and stayed in a motel on the outskirts of Alexandria. We took the metro into the city on the morning of January 20th, and when we emerged from the train car, we were in a crowd of thousands, bundled up in scarves and peacoats, trundling up the stairs and streets. We stood on the pale green lawn of the National Mall, at a spot by the base of the Washington Monument. There were hundreds of thousands, maybe millions there, all looking at the Capitol Building, listening to small speakers and watching tiny screens that were straddling the mall. The President-Elect placed one hand on the old book, lifted his other hand, said the oath. He’d voted against war and promised no more war. He’d told workers that he would join them on the picket line. There was visible relief being lifted from everyone’s shoulders. Finally, thank God, the worst was over.
My most recent trip to DC was a few weeks ago. I took the bus at 2 am on a Wednesday morning. We lurched out of the canyons of Manhattan and into the darkened and flat expanse of New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia. I got in by 5:30 or 6 am. The sun hadn’t risen yet on the East Coast. I bought a cup of coffee that cost $7.50 at the train station, and I watched as the barista sloshed the coffee back and forth as she poured the boiling water in a circular motion over the grounds. I sat in a metal chair in the marble expanse of the old train station and watched the iron doors spin open and close as the building came to life. There were men in suits, a few lone travelers. A couple sat next to me in the cafe’s seating area. The sitting area was demarcated by an iron fence, that closed it off from everyone else. The couple was dressed well, both wearing blazers, their phones on the table in front of them. They were checking schedules, going over itineraries, clearly off to a work conference together. I sat alone, drinking the coffee, savoring it.
When the paper cup was empty, and I could no longer pretend that it wasn’t, I finally set out from the train station. I walked down Massachusetts, past the new development condominiums and the glass facades taken up by lobbying firms across the political spectrum. I made my way into a coffee shop, bought another overpriced cup of black coffee, and made a spot in the corner, where I set up my bulky laptop, note-taking journal, and laptop charger. I’ve been told that my computer is a little ridiculous. It’s a laptop, but weighs about 15 pounds, and when it begins to boot up the fans in the mainframe are ridiculously loud. It sounds like a 747 revving for takeoff.
I sat in the corner of the coffee shop, in a narrow spot against the brick wall where people wouldn’t see me as they walked in. I hesitantly dove into work. I had a report to edit, sentences to tweak, charts and graphs to endlessly finagle. A pair of men walked in. They were both wearing suits and had bags with them. They were looking for a spot to charge up. They settled next to me and began to talk about work: they had a meeting there soon, and someone from the Hill was swinging by. They needed to discuss strategy: what to prioritize, what to omit, how best to frame their position. The one man was leading the thrust of the strategy; he was the superior, and had been in the business for longer by maybe only five, or ten years, judging by their age.
I edited a paper that, I am sure, will never see daylight. The other man came in. He was wearing professional clothes, but a little less stuffy than the lobbyists (a sharp blazer, but no tie). He was ostensibly a person of The People, working there because The People had elected his boss. They shook hands, smiled, exchanged pleasantries, leaped into talk of where they had gone to school, and where they might have had some overlap: other offices, other spots on the hill. Two of them had both gone to law school. The lobbyist had worked at one of the big firms, after school, and the legislative aide nodded at that. He knew the big law firm. Everyone, of course, knew the big law firm. The lobbyists were in digital privacy and compliance. They were in the healthcare industry. They probably knew the ins and outs of every law, and every regulation that is tangentially related to the healthcare industry, which is something that is almost universally acclaimed as an impressive qualification. They needled the aide, and gave their elevator pitch. The aide smiled, nodded, parried what they were saying, mentioned different corners of the law, and spoke in broad strokes:
“Well, we’re concerned about” this, and “Well we’d have to circle back about” that. I changed a graph on my computer, and tweaked the colors of the chart. This specific chart was much better when green and titled in a sans-serif font. These are the kinds of things that I worry about with work. Their conversation was wrapping up. The younger lobbyist was in a rhythm, and the supervisor had a kind of subtly proud smile. It was the smile that a parent gives when their kid is more impressive than another. But there was no clear sense, in the twenty-minute conversation, that anything had changed. The Congressmember would ‘look into the concerns’, which could mean anything. The aide stood up. They shook each other’s hands, spoke of how nice it was to meet the other, and then the aide left. The two other men stood awkwardly there. The supervisor gave the other a firm shake, “Knocked it out of the park”, he said. “I have to run and grab something, but I’ll meet you back at the office, alright? I’ve gotta’ hop in a cab.” The older man walked out of the coffeeshop. It was just me and the other lobbyist then. He was standing alone, by the desk, with his backpack. He had this proud, subdued smile on his face, like this was the mountaintop, like he had been through all of this, and this was it — this was the good stuff. He had perhaps made it a little bit easier for this company to skirt HIPPA. He smiled at himself and looked in a nearby mirror. He adjusted his tie. He did not look at me. He did not look at anyone else in the coffee shop, even the barista or the security guard as they tried to wish him a good day.
I’m thinking of another long bus ride. It was the Fall of 2012, my freshman year in college. I had hitched a ride on a bus filled with volunteers and organizers, headed for Iowa. During the five-hour ride from Chicago, the campaign staff played Obama’s ‘favorite music’ on an endless loop. Hours, and hours, of the same Stevie Wonder and Al Green, both of them jamming as people tried to yell over the music. We crossed the Mississippi River. It was my first time ever seeing that river, and even then, I thought of Huck and Jim. I wish now that I could have found a raft, and floated down the river and away from where I was going.
Each of us was given tight scripts, with the pitch that the campaign in Chicago wanted us to spout: that America was much, much better with Obama, and that the country was on the up and up. Stocks were booming, factory jobs were returning, and the housing market was finally stabilizing after the cataclysmic collapse of 2008. We had these scripts pressed into our hands and told to scatter across Dubuque. I knocked on hundreds of doors like an eager kid on Halloween night. I did my best impression of a chipper robot: I talked about how great Obama was, and how great things were becoming and could be. Door after door I saw tired faces looking back, mothers struggling to feed their toddlers, yards that were unkempt, abandoned lots, cars left to rot and rust. Of the hundreds of people I spoke to, just about everyone was exhausted. They had that look in their eyes. And they were tired, too, of all the different campaigns that had parachuted into Iowa to try and secure their six electoral votes. They listened to the script and then politely, but forcefully, told me to leave. Door after door. There were kids yelling and screaming in the house, usually. I heard glass shatter at one of them.
I would scamper over to the next house. It would sometimes be vacant, with the foreclosure signs on the door or in the yard. And then we bused out of the city, past abandoned storefronts, and quiet factories, over the Mississippi again, and the music played and everyone else on the bus was extremely bubbly and energized. For my efforts, I was given a ticket to Obama’s election night speech.
I stood for hours in a brightly lit convention line in Chicago. Everyone, including me, was looking at their phones. We were watching the numbers change. The colors of the states of the map would change, from yellow to blue to deep red or deep blue. When the little boxes lit up blue, there was a sharp yell in the room. When they turned yellow, or red, the murmuring returned. We were shuffled into the main auditorium. The stage was far away. It was done up with spotlights, and gigantic American flags. It looked less like a stage, and more like a television studio. To our side there was a cordoned-off pathway, and as the crowd filled in people began to walk down the pathway. A few people next to me began to chatter about the celebrities they recognized. Yelling and screaming ensued. The celebrities began to fill the bleachers behind the stage, and then he came out, the big man himself.
He waved. The music played loudly — the music from the bus. People yelled, screeched, and lifted their hands in the air in a desperate attempt to grab a good photograph or video. He stood behind the podium and said… nothing that I can discernably remember, nothing that stuck in my mind. But it didn’t really matter what he said. The pageantry was the point: the pomp and circumstance, the celebratory music, the energy that was emanating from the crowd. You weren’t supposed to think or remember any particular thing: you were supposed to feel a certain way. I remember looking around and thinking of the inauguration nearly three years earlier. When George Bush’s helicopter lifted above the mall during Obama’s inauguration, the crowd around us spontaneously lifted their hands and gave Bush the middle finger. It was a moment that I loved, because it was unscripted: it was a mass of people, responding as they truly felt. It was crass, and crude, but it was real and beautiful. But then there was this, at the victory speech. It was a crowd of well-dressed people, equally phone and Twitter addicted, holding their lanyards close to them as they lifted their hands in the air to take pictures and videos. I was reminded, suddenly, of church, of mass. The people had their arms raised in the air as if they were looking for a sign. Or maybe, perhaps, they just wanted to be close to something, to feel that they were immovable and innate parts of this moment. The leader on the stage recited the aphorisms and cliches that everyone felt about America being great, about how anything in this country was possible.What I remember the President saying: “… This belongs to you.”I looked around. It belonged to us. But it wasn’t ours.
After I was done working in the morning, I shut up my laptop and walked out of the cafe. I trundled down the avenue, past the theatre where Lincoln was killed. The sun was out, bright and gorgeous. I meandered past Pennsylvania, and the streets with the White House, and the Executive Office buildings, and scooched past the crowds of tourists that were squeezing past the iron gates guarded by cops and soldiers. I walked from the north side of the National Mall. The Washington Monument was there, at the top of its hill, with its circle of American flags surrounding the base. The side near me was all dark shadows. The marble on the sun-facing end was lit up gloriously. I walked down the long mall, stopped on a bench here or there, and watched the others who passed me. At first, I thought I had gone to the wrong spot. I inspected the message I had been sent and zoomed in on the map just to make sure. Nope, I was headed in the right spot.
I got closer; there were maybe a few hundred people there, max. Most of the noise was coming from speakers that were surrounding a stage situated by the road. The people who were there were milling. There were lots of people checking their phones, talking to their friends that they had come with, sitting down in the grass and protecting their cardboard signs. This is the point in every social event where I consider bailing. It was clear, bright, and incredibly warm for an October afternoon. I could grab lunch and sit in the grass, walk through one of the many museums, or find a Biergarten somewhere and read and write in the shade. Heaven on Earth for me is a quiet place, on a nice day, where I can pretend for a few moments that everything is good. It would be easy to carve out my own temporary heaven on earth today. Standing on the threshold of the crowd, I knew that I wasn’t so far away from making that decision. I had come here alone, without a sign, and without any clear sense that I was supposed to be there. If I left then, nobody would miss me. I could slink away from everyone, and the world and them would be no worse off for it.
I stood at the edge of the crowd. The number of people began to swell, finally. At the front of the protest, people began to approach the microphone. There were lead organizers, an excellent writer, a local rabbi, and a brave Congresswoman. They all said some variation of the same thing: that this war was bad, that it must end, and that this government was complicit. They spoke in front of the Capitol Building. Cops were leaning against the hoods of their cruisers, smiling and laughing. The Congresswoman cried. She is a Palestinian-American. She was recently censured by the House of Representatives because they did not like what she was willing to say. I looked at the people around me: there were many people my age, young and progressive, with signs that had been meticulously painted that day or the night before. In the major protests of the last half-decade, there has been a proliferation of clever, witty signs, full of puns and memes and nods to the internet. But the signs here were largely not like that. They were simple boards, stapled to pickets. The signs gave clear, declarative demands. Or they listed names: the names of hundreds of Palestinian children killed. Now the number is more than 4,000. Tomorrow, it will be more.
There was an old man standing near me. He was alone. He carried a Palestinian flag on a large pole. He looped the cloth onto his pole like it was a small, but deliberate action that would make a dent in something. In front of me, there was a mother and her young daughter who was maybe two, or three. The mother spoke to her daughter both in English and Arabic. She was holding her hand and telling her what was happening in the speech. The daughter would pay attention but then waddle off and lay in the grass. There were many people around me on the verge of tears. I could hear people inhaling sharply when certain things were said, such as Never Again, or Not in Our Name. When looking around, you could see the glistening in people’s eyes. I’d watch those same people as they watched the little girl in front of us stumble across the grass. I could hear a few voices whispering. A group of young women waved at the girl. Their eyes were glistening, still, but in a better way.
When every speech had been made, and the march was done with, everyone dispersed. When people disperse at these protests, it’s like they’re the fuzz on the head of a dandelion, being blown to the wind. Most of everyone else trucked out with a group. A good group of people were still being handcuffed with chicken wire and being led into police buses. But I drifted off alone. I walked in the middle of a few of the nearby avenues, which had been blocked off to traffic. I walked past the botanical garden and a few congressional buildings. I heard people brainstorming about dinner plans, and what could be done next. But I walked away alone, and when my feet were aching, I found a place to spot by the Capitol reflecting pool.
A group of tourists came near and took a spot next to me. It was a mother, father, and two sons, who were about my age. They were speaking in Spanish. I was looking at a statue of a man riding a horse, and the mother asked her sons who it was. One of the boys looked at his map.
“Uh… General Grant,” he said. “Guerra Civil.”
“Oh, oh,” she said. “La guerra de esclavitud?”
It was there that my Spanish faltered. I pretended not to listen, as I looked at the statue and the Capitol Building behind it. I could only pick out a few words, scattered between them.
Him: “Pues, Capitalismo… negocio… Mucho dinero y… Prosperidad… Libertad…Democracia liberal”
Her: “Oh no no… Gasolina… Chavez… Socialismo… Guerra… Castro…”
The sun was coming down. They walked away, arguing, and I reluctantly picked up my bag and headed out as well. I meandered back down the mall again. The long, sterile lawn was empty. I watched a young kid chasing a squirrel, and people walking in large single-file lines in school groups. Chaperones were yelling at the kids to stay in line. Some of the kids were from Ohio. I went to the World War Two Monument and stood in front of the column that said ‘Ohio’, and I thought of people I had known from Ohio who had fought in the war, and certainly fought for something. They probably thought that might be the last war. Or, at least, they hoped it. They were dead now. I walked past the Vietnam War memorial. When I was there, a mother and her child were looking through the massive book of names. An older woman was sketching a name from off the wall. In the Constitution Gardens, a young couple rode past on their bicycles, and a pair of tourists were leaning against one of the weeping willow trees, trying to make out and hide under the umbrella-like branches.
Since I had to walk that way again, I stopped at the Washington Monument. There were very few people there now. On a whim, I tried to find the exact spot that my family and I had stood at during the inauguration in 2009. It was on a patch of grass, on the downslope from the top of the hill that props up the monument. When I had been standing there, last, there had been hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. The mall had been flanked by massive speakers and television screens. And far off in the distance had been the Capitol Building. It had seemed large 14 years ago. Everything had seemed large then, as a matter of fact. But when I stood there now, the building was tiny, like a little thimble on the horizon. How could something so tiny be so big, so imposing, such an obstacle to everything that seemed to be good? I held out my hand, and stretched out my fingertips until I had the base of the building on my thumb and the roof lodged against my index finger. It was there in my hands. That’s how it felt. So small, so fragile. I could do it. So easy. All it would require is clenching the fingers, and forming a fist.