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Juxtapositions
I just got back from another trip to Capital City…ahem, D.C., and as it is every time, I had that “stranger in a strange land” feeling. I was in the area for the graduation of my nephew from Officer Candidate School, United States Marine Corps at Quantico. That part of the trip was amazing! Nearly 300 young men and women completed OCS and 231 of them were immediately commissioned as 2nd Lieutenants in the USMC, including my nephew. If you want to contemplate hope for our future as a country, just think of these hearty young officers. Please pray for them all and their chain of command. (The idea that Beto would be the commander-in-chief of such fine young Americans is stomach turning! He’s not fit to take my nephew’s Taco Bell order!)
My nephew is the “sheepdog” that Chris Kyle described…a natural leader of young men (he was captain of his college baseball team for two years) and a protector, always a helper, with a big heart. Our family is so proud of him!
One of the juxtapositions I experienced is the stark difference from observing the fine young officers at Quantico to observing the seemingly self-important young adults you find crawling all over D.C. Every time I go to D.C., I am struck by the vast numbers of young adults around who seem to be employed there in some fashion. When you see them jogging about on their lunch hour or after work, they are inevitably wearing their status-signaling college T-shirt (Cornell, Boston U, Penn, Dartmouth etc.). I know that some of these young people are just this semester’s interns at their congressman’s office, but many are the young staffers of The Hill, who are doing “Very Important Work.” I imagine that many of them think us old codgers, age 35 and up, are hopelessly stupid and we need these young people to put forth their brilliant ideas because we haven’t thought of them before. I always look around in D.C. and wonder where the adults are and where are they hiding, you just don’t see many on street level. (Who was it that said journalists don’t know anything…they are all 27 and know nothing? I feel the same way about the young staffers you see crawling the Hill.) The young USMC officers and the young DC staffers…all serving, but in vastly different ways.
The other juxtaposition for me was the difference between my Monday and my Tuesday of this week. Monday lunch I’m grabbing a bite from a wrap and salad place in Foggy Bottom, surrounded by the crackling air of power in DC and young people doing Very Important Work in the Capital; CNN was on the TV. On Tuesday, I was grabbing lunch at a family owned cafe near the Texas/Oklahoma border due to a business trip for my first day back in the office. What a difference! On Tuesday, my fellow diners were of all ages, mostly in jeans and work boots which were covered in dust/dried mud, no TVs in the place, but a country station was playing. I was a stranger at the cafe, but I was treated warmly and with interest. My sedan was one of the only ones in the parking lot while most other vehicles were pickup trucks, many were Duallys with gooseneck cattle trailers attached with their bovine occupants occasionally voicing their complaints. In the cafe, there was much cross talk of cattle prices and the weather (lots of rain has apparently delayed planting), the flooding up in the midwest and the success of some local high schools’ baseball seasons. Not a word about politics was uttered.
I couldn’t help but think about the young staffer with a degree in public administration from a near-Ivy I had seen in DC the day before, likely has absolutely no clue about the lives of these Americans at the cafe. And, I’m guessing that the people in the cafe would quickly get disgusted with how things are done in D.C. Same country, but two vastly different countries.
Published in General
I have in-laws who live in DC. It is a swamp. It’s a difficult place to live, such a boomtown with all the construction and both traffic and parking are so congested. The worst part, however, is the intellectual conformity that is not only expected but enforced. Think of what happened to the school boys…that is absolutely everywhere. We went to a diner in Bethesda for breakfast one morning and the entire section of the place was given an ongoing political harangue by a waiter. If Amazon really does move in to Virginia it will only get worse, if that is at all possible. Groupthink at its finest.
I think of these juxtapositions also. I think San Francisco is even worse than DC. As the capital city, DC will pull in people from all over the USA with many different jobs. I’m thinking of defense contractors, for instance. Or even the Trump administration. A minority, to be sure, but they are there somewhere. Here in San Francisco, Google employees will object to Google even assisting the Defense Dept., while merrily helping China with its fascist control and monitoring technology. San Francisco is almost devoid of useful or free-thinking people.
This is true. My now adult kids had a regular babysitter when they were young that is now working in the Trump Whitehouse. She had previously been a staffer for Tom Cotton. She is a smart, lovely young lady – voted one of the most beautiful on the Hill a couple of years back. Although, I bet she doesn’t jog around town in her Arkansas State T-shirt. She hooked us up with a Whitehouse tour on our last trip. She said she doesn’t necessarily share her employment status in social settings.
Some good work is done in D.C. at places such as the Naval Research Lab. But it’s miles away, both literally and figuratively, from the politicians and staffers of Congress.
There are those who serve, and those who serve themselves.
Great post, and so true. I haven’t been to DC in years, but we used to visit relatives there because my ex-mother-in-law is from there and my ex was born there. Similar stark juxtapositions can be found between the slimy blue swamp of Chicago and the rest of Illinois with its prairies and farmlands, New York City and upstate New York, similar to Illinois in some ways.
That reminds me of my day on Wednesday. I had to go to Reston – a trendy “new town” near Dulles Airport outside of DC – to talk to a “genius” at the Apple Store about my iPad. After figuring out it wasn’t worth fixing, I bought a new one and spent about an hour there setting it up. Through the process, I went through about three Apple employees and it was all I could do to keep them straight – the young skinny guy with a black tee shirt and his ball cap on backwards or the young skinny guy with a black tee shirt and his hair in a bun or the young skinny guy with a black tee shirt and haircut with shaved sides and a mop on top.
By the time I left, I had almost overdosed on hip. The entire town center is filled with the same people who all looked the same in the attempt to be individuals.
On the way home, I went through Herndon. It is only about 5 miles away, but is a world apart. It was originally a dairy town on the W&OD railroad. I had lunch at the Burger King along with a room full of old white guys and felt right at home.
Yep. This is one of the funniest aspects of their utter lack of self-awareness: they’re conforming in their purposeful attempts at non-conformity.
The real genius at Apple is the person who thought of titling their customer service people as “geniuses.” Probably helps recruit any given talent level at about 15% cheaper than they would otherwise have to pay.
They’re the ones in the limos with darkened windows.
I think they are typical of a lot of help desk personnel who have no real knowledge, but do have access to information that we don’t.
I’ve managed to mostly avoid the area for several years. But when I did go there once in a while I was always struck (from the local media) by how self-important they thought they were – how much they consider themselves the center of the universe, and assumed that everybody everywhere hung on every detail of what the people of Washington, DC do.
They seemed clueless that most of the rest of the country ignores them or at least wishes they’d go away and stop getting in the way. Unfortunately, too many of the swamp denizens have written, and are writing, laws and regulations to make it harder for the rest of us to ignore them.
To be fair, their participation trophy for working in Congress is HUGE.
A little inside baseball – for the better part of the last decade I have been working within the DoD acquisition process, generally doing something akin to market research. A number of my college classmates who are still serving work in the Pentagon. I see them fairly frequently, as my work has me going to DC on a regular basis. Something one of them told me several years ago has stuck with me. He said, as we were touring Congress one time, (paraphrasing) ‘Whenever a Congressional Staffer calls the office, we accord them the courtesy normally given to a Lt General.’
They accord them the courtesy normally reserved for a 3-star General – try that on for size.
Lol. Civilization is 7,000 years deep. There’s very little that hasn’t been thought of, and tried, before.
Ben Rhodes, I think. Not someone you’d want to be associated with.
I grew up in Northern Virginia, which grew up around me. I left in 1985 and returned from 2006-2011. Now, every day, I’m happy to be well outside the Beltway. All there is to do there is politics, all the time, every day.