We Have Become the Weird Neighbor
The 250th anniversary of the founding of this country is weeks away, and I find myself thinking about the last time we marked a milestone like this.
I was ten years old in 1976. The summer before the bicentennial, my grandmother and I made a dress together — a colonial period dress, long and simple, emerald green with a white apron and bonnet, the kind women wore in 1776. I was a Girl Scout, and sewing it earned me my badge. Every girl in the troop made one. We wore them all year, to every activity, to every event. We were ten years old and we were living history.
The bicentennial was everywhere — variety shows, sitcoms, school curricula. We read Little House on the Prairie to understand what founding a country looked like through the eyes of someone our age. The entire culture turned toward its own history and said: look at what we built.
And we were a wounded country. Vietnam had not fully closed. The civil rights movement had cracked open truths that were still raw. At my family’s dinner table every night, my father — an Army Colonel, a Republican — sat across from my siblings in bell bottoms with long hair. The tension was real. The divide felt permanent.
But the country knew what it was celebrating. Not ourselves — an idea. That the people govern themselves. That power transfers peacefully. That the country evolves with the demands of the world. We were divided and we celebrated anyway, because the idea was larger than the division.
Now look at Washington, D.C. two weeks before our 250th.
The East Wing of the White House is a pile of rubble. The Rose Garden has been paved over. The South Lawn still holds the UFC cage from a pay-per-view event held there last week — not for the people, for profit. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turned green with algae, dead ducks pulled from the water, visitors reporting the smell, the whole mess now ringed with cyclone fencing. The administration is blaming vandals. The Kennedy Center — a memorial to a murdered president — has its facade hidden behind a tarp, concealing the court-ordered removal of Trump’s name. Petty vanity, obscuring a national memorial.
A satellite image taken this week shows the White House grounds from above. The rubble is visible from space.
This same week, the World Cup brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to the United States for the first time. And they were surprised. Surprised that Americans are kind. Surprised that strangers help you. Surprised that the country is nothing like what they expected.
A Scottish visitor said the America he was experiencing was the America he’d been promised growing up — nothing like what he’d seen reported. A British supporter said on camera: “We owe America a huge apology. America is nothing like the media tells us.”
None of us believe the current state of Washington represents us. Neither does reality television, neither does propaganda media. But we are now the weird house in the neighborhood. You know the one. The one kids dare each other to knock on the door. The one that nails lattice in the wrong places. The one where the mail piles up. When you hear gossip about an upstanding neighbor, you dismiss it. When it is about the weird house, you think it might be possible.
Let’s face it, our house has a lot of gold painted lattice nailed to the garage. It is time to work together to bring in a new tenant, one who respects our neighborhood and our neighbors.
On Democracy Spark I write about what is happening to the country. But what is happening to the country has been happening to my life and my resources. Like most people, I have been cutting back, doing with less, doing without. This year I stopped and took an honest look at the erosion — what it actually adds up to, and what it means for the rest of my retirement. I decided to share this process because I know I’m not alone in it, and I am tired of feeling like I am. In my new blog, So She Left, I write about what it looks like from the inside — the discoveries, the hard choices, the things I never expected to be figuring out at this stage of my life. It is a journal more than anything else. If this resonates, I would be glad to have you walk alongside.
Democracy Spark works with grassroots democracy organizations who are drowning in the work behind the work. Chasing RSVPs. Manually reconciling lists. Sending updates that land in spam. A few paying for everything, most contributing very little. Rebuilding the wheel before every event. If your team is spending more energy keeping the organization running than running the organization — that's where I come in. www.democracyspark.org