I love our home. And by that I mean, I love my tree-house porch, our revolving-door kitchen table with its sunflowers, rose sprays or peonies, and the miles of leafy trails along the creek in my backyard. I love my friendly neighbors and fluffy neighbors—can’t get around the block without a conversation and a nose-to-tail hello—the annual trivia competition at Clara Barton Community Center and the Strawberry Festival at Redeemer.
I love that Finn has biked to Great Falls and walked to Georgetown, Tatum and Clara can take the bus to Bethesda or metro down to the American History museum from Friendship Heights, and Kevin can drive along the river, park and be in his office in less than half an hour.
And he works right next to the White House in a light-filled, modern, artful building in the nation’s capital. I love Washington, DC, my home-base city. It is beautiful, designed on the concepts of Paris, and has for 100 years been called the City of Trees. The sturdy, sparkling Potomac anchors us and invites everything from graceful cranes to JFK’s beacon to the arts, the Kennedy Center, to make a home here.
No one would call it a perfect city, but it’s a lovely one, filled with mom-and-pop restaurants as well as Michelin-starred ones. It still needs to be less segregated and safer, for sure. But since my childhood in the 80s, it has become increasingly safer, cleaner and more peaceful. The data back up what we can see with our very own eyes; crime rates are at a 30-year low.
To call in the National Guard to clean up crime in our mostly peaceful city makes as much sense as to let a Bannockburn elementary student use chalk to fix scratches in Monet painting.
Why not use our precious federal funding to provide more mental health services, help people overcome addiction, improve the pay for high school teachers, provide paid parental leave and free and high-quality preschool so young dads and moms can get steady jobs, and buy back automatic assault weapons? Those approaches are known to reduce crime rates.
Bringing in young, patriotic and altruistic American soldiers to point guns at or intimidate other Americans, even petty thieves, is a horrible feeling for everyone. Those trained troops must be at least partially uncomfortable being asked to see us as the enemy…that’s not what they signed up for. They bravely signed up to defend our country from true danger, whether that’s a 9/11-style attack by al qaeda or people aiming to kill our elected leaders and incredible policemen in the Capitol building.
Bringing in a violent approach to improve a mostly peaceful situation introduces the very violence it purports to fix. Weird.
So those were my thoughts on my morning walk along the sturdy and sparkling Potomac yesterday, as I snapped images of this city and this country that I love.
@theterrace 