When the Devil Shows Up on Your Doorstep...

Two weeks ago, on a Saturday night at 1 a.m., my entire neighborhood was torn from sleep by the sound of a massive explosion, followed by the deafening sound of grinding metal. Hearing this, I jumped out of bed, fumbled for the light, slammed a door open, and with most of the inhabitants of my house and the rest of the neighborhood, ran downstairs.

It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life – being jerked out of from exhausted sleep by what sounded like a bomb going off, then the sounds of an entire neighborhood flipping on light switches, opening windows and doors, afraid of what they would see, while all the while, the huge grinding sound continues, as if huge robots are waging war above the nighttime rowhomes of Petworth.

A 17-year-old boy had stolen a car from Kennedy and raced it south down 7th Street NW, losing control about half a block above Farragut and then careening into a parked Acura, a parked Jaguar, a parked Toyota and two other parked cars, before flipping over and exploding in a fireball about 30 feet from the home of Peggy Watson’s house, where I have been living.

The 17-year-old boy had been thrown from the car and was smeared across the road; his 15-year-old friend who had been in the car with him but who had gotten out alive sat on the curb and watched his friend dying. The flames of the still-burning car flickered in the eyes of the neighbors, some of whom held each other, some of whom cried, waiting for the police and firetrucks to arrive. At the end of the street, three men watched the car burn from the wheelchairs to which gunfights had consigned them from the rest of their lives. The guys in the wheelchairs were all under 30. “It’s like Vietnam,” Peggy said.

“This is the summer, here,” Peggy said. “This is just the beginning.”

Peggy Watson’s house is a little like a stone fortress on the corner of 7th and Farragut NW. She is a little bit of the block captain and unofficial mom of the neighborhood. She has two cats, one of which is named Hannah. I don’t know how she holds it together. This horrible scene is only the most spectacular of the things I witnessed there.

I have lived in a lot of places, and not all of them have been what is called ‘nice’, but I was completely unprepared for the stewpot of dehumanization, racial animosity, sexual harassment, mental illness, and just sheer hopelessness in the part of DC that I happened to wash up on. I was consumed by it, because I am always attuned to my environment, and I soak it up.

One of the survival instincts I lack is the ability to disregard other people’s pain; the 70/71 bus (which runs down Georgia Avenue, which I would take to work for the first two months of my existence here) is a moving holding tank of pathos and despair. My second week in town, while waiting for the bus in the morning, I started talking to a man who was waiting at my stop, at Farragut and Georgia. He was about 45, and had been waiting there all night looking for his teenage daughter, who had gotten into drugs and run away from home. He showed me a picture of her and asked if I’d seen her, and I said no, and he said, “Of course, she probably looks different now, she’s probably lost weight.” He had moved to DC with his family from Detroit for a job, and he regretted ever coming here, because the toxins had gotten to his daughter, and he was powerless to do anything about it. The bus pulled up and I had to get on, so I cried a little bit and gave him a hug and wished him good luck and watched him alone on the bench, from the window of the bus.

I have to write this down because I don’t know what else to do. The things I have seen are so awful: the girl’s wrist, for example. There was a tiny, 13-year-old pregnant girl in my neighborhood, and her wrist was as thin as a pencil, she was so underfed. Or - one time going at home at night on the bus, we had to pull over, and everyone had to get off and walk because someone on the back of the bus had literally shit on the floor of the bus.

A community service for the boy who’d died in the car wreck was held a week after the accident, right in front of my house. There were people who walked away from the service and made drug deals two blocks down the street in the early evening sunset. Peggy Watson got up in front of the crowd – she’s lived there for 20 years - and gave a speech that was an act of love. I was very proud of her. “Don’t let anyone tell you aren’t beautiful because you are black,” she said. “We are all beautiful. Don’t let anyone put you down.”

Five days after the accident, I went with Lynda to a happy hour and panel about the DC local blogger community put on by the Next American City magazine. I had never seen this magazine before, even though it is published out of Philadelphia; it was a gorgeously designed urban planning mag about sustainability and carbon footprints and phrases like ‘the built environment’, funded by some foundations, with no ads at all.

The cover of the magazine said “Cities in Crisis,” with a picture of a little old African American lady walking past a crumbling building (assumably Detroit, since they are now the poster child for romanticized urban ‘decay’.) Despite this being a 65 percent African American city, not only were none of the DC bloggers black – there wasn’t a single black person in the whole room! I was astounded. If I needed more of a reminder for why solving the digital divide is important, I don’t think I could have gotten one.

The event mystified me – the reality mystified me. I do not say this to cast aspersions on DC local bloggers, who are a group of extremely idealistic people that are probably the first generation of the DC transient class to ever care about the health of the city. This is a huge and important development.

The thing that is really and truly disturbing about the social breakdown and sorrow of DC is that is happens right under the nose of the most powerful people on the planet. People who could solve these problems with the stroke of a pen. The political class here has completely abdicated its responsibility to its neighbors, and that says everything you need to know about the way they go about running the rest of the country. One cannot govern humanely if you are choosing to ignore the real people around you who need help. That is a strange way to live, and that is why Washington is so dehumanizing. It has echoes of the slave city it once was. Not too long ago, this was not free land. And the two-class city that has replaced it doesn’t really look much different.

The only sure-fire way I know of breaking apathy and hopelessness is by teaching people that they have power over their own lives. That is the only thing that works. Having something to build towards brings out the best in people. The Obama campaign energy is still there, but it has to be channeled in DC, or else it will turn into more cynicism.

Right before I left Philly, I met this magical woman who had lived in DC in the 70s, and she told me about her life here then. It was a different world entirely. It was so much happier of a place, she told me, before crack was invented and all the guns came. She told me about a strip of discos – I don’t know where - where they would literally close down the street so people could rollerskate between clubs. And it would be a Saturday night and all these folks would be out rollerskating. In mean old DC.

Democracy does not cure all problems, and it does not turn thugs into rollerskaters. But what it does do is give people the opportunity to address the problems they see in their own community. What I don’t quite understand yet here is how the disenfranchisement of DC residents exactly works – but I have a feeling that this is connected somehow to all these other problems. Peggy tried to teach me this, but I am still confused, especially since we apparently have a functioning city government.

At the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights dinner, I met the outreach coordinator of DC Vote, and the poor woman got treated to a 30-minute harangue about what field consultant they should hire and how they should go after the unions and all that. “Oh yeah, there's about a six month window with political professionals after they get to town,” Nathan says, watching my enthusiasm. “After that people get resigned to not voting.”

I suspect I will probably be an exception to this, but I don’t have the foggiest idea how I will have time to work on this. However, it’s definitely the next thing that needs to happen in the democracy movement. Suffrage. Suffrage is … come on, it’s Democracy 101. And how beautiful a thing it would be to have an actual democracy movement right in the face of the American federal government.

P.S. I want to give a promo to the blog Lynda writes for (this is Lynda Laughlin, formerly of Temple, for those of you who know her): www.greatergreaterwashington.org. It is very good and smart and community minded and they are on a crusade to clean up the Anacostia River. It also has a blogroll of other local DC blogs. Someday I will write about the DC bloggers. They all know each other and complain about each other, it’s a community. I suppose I am one of them now since I am a blogger and live here. Hooray that I found the other writers!