Lost and Found in DC

by Paul Slusher
Raptorial

...This place, this old city...it is a place of feeling, but yet of a strange distance...warmth but fear...wealth stands erect and proud, while it watches its back (with the help of a few poorly paid henchmen). Come to think of it, the only thing that connects the wealth and the poor in this crazy place is that the poorest folk seem to have the same color of skin as the henchmen and security...namely something slightly darker than that pinkish tint that seems to be the skin color pattern of the wealthy and politically affluent.
DC is a city of contradictions, and just bringing up the topic to anyone here can start a reflective conversation, a critical conversation and inevitably a conversation about race and power. Here, more than anywhere else I have spent time in my life, is a place about the realities of economic isolation and political rationalization...where aging city buses are filled with the working low and middle class African-American folk, rushing off to serve their bosses...they sit silently in the dark of the morning. I sometimes wonder if they, me, we are all going off to war and that is why the silence surrounds us. Few look at each other in the morning...prior to going to work for "the man" few even think about much else except "gettin' there and gettin' done".
Once the day is done, many will begin to smile. The same silent morning folk will say hello, give a stranger directions, and even stop to talk about those crazy Washington Redskins or why the Orioles didn't beat the Yankees in the playoffs. It's as if one can be proud with a day well done and a day that no longer belongs to "the man". I walk home, having done my time today, like so many others. There is no limo waiting for us. There are only corner stores half-filled with cheap beer and wine, processed foods and the smiling but distant Asians and whites who sit behind the counter...looking at each customer as if he or she will be the next one to cause trouble, steal or intimidate them.
I wonder if my work is doing anything to make this world a better place, the country a better place. I wonder, sometimes aloud, how can we make DC a better place?...A more empowering place? Because if you can solve that one...then you are certain to the be the cultural messiah in a land where hope is only visible on TV and at the local churches. Hope, like everything else in America...packaged to sell, while the demand is high. TV advertisement executives get rich...Churches "save" souls. Six or one half dozen...it's all the same.

DC, the reflection of America, is a place where the majority are black, the majority are poor, and yet still they have no real political representation. They live minutes from the President, from the Congress, from the Senate building, yet no one listens to them. No candidate gives campaign speeches to them. Yet I live here now. I am becoming a part of them. I live with them, and I see and feel more and more the anger, the isolation and the segregation that has become (perhaps by design) our nation's capitol.
It's a funny thing living in DC. It was by circumstance that I moved to a poor part of town when I moved here from the West coast. But it is by choice that I remain here. If nothing else, DC is real. DC is honest. DC is bare-bones, straight-up, and in your face. If you feel the urge to pick a fight in the name of cultural sovereignty, or challenge yourself with the realities of racism and classism in America, this is your campus. Tuition at this place of learning, it seems, is affordable, but the lessons you learn here may forever leave you overcome by debt...a debt to the ideals that we say we believe in, we say we have in America, but that have been tossed aside in the City's capital.
And so the inevitable question arises. If it is lost in the Capitol of our nation, then how can it survive anywhere else across this land? Good question. Perhaps it cannot. Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it never did.