what it was like in washington

I was in Washington, D.C., over the weekend. A friend asked what it was like there. “Weird,” I said. I tried to explain a little more descriptively and failed, but maybe this will explain.

Being in Washington this past weekend was like living next to a busy highway. The State of Ohio put a freeway through my grandparents’ farm, so I used to get a taste of this from time to time. It’s the first thing you notice. Then you get used to the hum; you forget it’s there and go about your work. And then, a truck uses its engine brake, or you hear a Doppler effect as someone lays on their horn, or sometimes the noise just penetrates your consciousness again, and you’re aware again: oh yeah, there’s a highway right there ruining this place.

All of life is like that right now, but in Washington it’s more intense. People were doing normal things. The cherry blossoms were at their peak, and the crowds were enormous. There was a kite festival at the Washington Monument, and families and couples and silly kids were having a blast.

I went to museums and looked at art and artifacts from history and a megalodon. I watched a panda climb a tree.

And then I would turn a corner, I’d get a reminder: They’re trying to destroy this.

I was staying a few blocks from the White House. Every time it came into view, which was a lot, I felt my blood pressure spike. I think I managed to keep the White House out of every picture I took. When you’re looking at cherry blossoms on the Mall or a kite festival at the Washington Monument, the White House keeps trying to sneak into the background. Normally that would be fine. This time it was like an 18-wheeler ruining the bucolic view.

I went to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It’s almost across the street from the White House; the so-called President can see it from his bedroom. So I would notice that and think, that racist fuck probably becomes enraged when he looks out his window at this building, this building that he surely has never visited, this building where I watched parents explaining language to their kids, watched people marveling at Whitney Houston’s gown and sitting in front of Emmett Till’s casket and reading about the slave trade. Responding to these things with pride, frustration, joy, anger, the whole range of life. It was a joy to see that - accompanied by the feeling that they’re going to try to tear it all down.

I went to lunch at the National Museum of the American Indian. A woman from Minnesota sat down across from me and we talked about why we were in town. She told me she had grown up on a reservation in northern Minnesota. She owns a building that houses a post office and was in D.C. for a conference. Naturally, the next thing we talked about was the precariousness of the Postal Service at this point in time. We talked about other things, of course, the beautiful way you enter the building, the exhibits upstairs, fry bread. But there it was again, that hum in the background.

I went to a baseball game, people-watched on the Mall, battled the crowds at the Tidal Basin. It was all normal. And nothing was normal at all. I could feel the freeway waiting to announce itself again. I would pass someone talking about job losses, or see a young man with an FDIC bag on the Metro, or walk past any number of think-tanks on Massachusetts Avenue - think tanks that had helped stitch together the so-called theories that serve as pretty curtains decorating the windows of a fascist, windows looking out over a beautiful country that he despises.

Flawed, but beautiful. Still struggling to be more perfect, but beautiful.

I went to the National Archives on Sunday. I hadn’t thought about doing that, but Cindy, the woman from Minnesota, said that she felt a need to lay eyes on the Constitution, and was disappointed that she hadn’t had time to do that. So I went for both of us.

You can still walk in and see all the documents in that Pantheon that honors not men but their ideals - ideals that they never entirely believed, as the museums dedicated to African Americans and American Indians show us, but that they wrote down despite themselves. They’re faded so badly now, those documents, that you can no longer read them. Which is unfortunate, but for me, I enjoyed more watching the crowd, people from all over the country and, for now, all over the world, coming to learn. Watching a guide explain in detail the room’s paintings to a young Black man, maybe a college student, who couldn’t get enough.

Outside were the monuments that honor men (and almost entirely men). On Saturday I had walked through the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial, along with the enormous crowds. Even on the busiest day of the year, it remained powerfully inspiring. And, again, another horn sounding: the likelihood that the current squatter in the White House will try to vandalize it in the coming months. If the racists leave it at all, I fear they’ll alter the statue to show Dr. King as a smiling Father Christmas of civil rights, not the determined fighter who was surveilled by the FBI.

I was in that place trying to find a group of transgender veterans whom I had met the day before, across the street from the Department of Veterans Affairs, where they were protesting the effort to deny them the benefits they earned with their service to the nation. They were holding a second protest Saturday, but as it turned out, I couldn’t find them among the hordes.

Looking for them, I passed the famous quote from Dr. King about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. What he did not say is that it bends because we bend it. So, failing to find my new friends, I made it a point to ask as many people in positions of authority as I could, “Have you seen a group of transgender servicepeople come through here?” Just to normalize in a few people’s minds the possibility of a transgender soldier. Just a little drop of water against the rock.

Walking out of the Archives, I passed a security guard who had given me a broad smile as I came in. Like all of the guards protecting our sacred scriptures, he was Black. He smiled again and wished me a good afternoon. I told him, “You keep guarding the pieces of paper, and we’ll keep trying to defend what they stand for.” He laughed and gave me a fist bump.

Outside, a different Black man was selling MAGA hats.

That’s what it was like being in Washington this week.