I took a detour on my way to work this morning by walking across the Capitol directly catch the Orange/Blue lines. [I don’t like crowds, and if you’ve been in Union Station with broken escalators between 7.45-8.45AM, you might sympathize.] Halfway to the station, I looked up and this is what I saw:
I remember thinking to myself while looking at the security with automatic weapons and thought, “I own this.” OK. Well only about 1/300,000,000th of it. But I still own it along with all of you. If you’ve been to the Capitol before, you know that it is very quiet, and has a transcendent quality to it.
If your only impressions of the Capitol come from news and media, the quiet on the Hill will be shocking. If you surrender to the quiet you will very quickly move past any initial thoughts and be impressed by just how uniquely obligated to one another we are. You might become aware by a feeling of goodwill towards your fellow citizens, and might find yourself asking that God give the staffers whom you watch go to work wisdom. I began for a moment to think that we were all working for the same goal: the greater welfare of our nation, and it’s role in promoting the broader welfare of the global community.
But then I went to work and got back in touch with reality. We really do need to take back our country, but from whom? Who do we implore to seriously engage with the evidence suggesting the need for adapting to climatic changes? Whom do we ask to lead us into an era where unions will become obsolete due to the economic forces germane to globalization? (Who can help protect the standard of life in such an economic environment?). Whom do we ask to give us back the power to make decisions about our lives that account for both ecological carrying capacity and social justice? We have lost our country only to the extent that we have lost the ability to have a national discussion about these issues, but our lifestyle and socioeconomic systems prevent us from effectively dealing with these issues.
We have lost our country to those who don’t want us to think about these things, but we’ve lost it only because we’ve given it away.