Washington, DC: A Memoir, Part 1- Living through an Abraxas time of cultural upheaval
Washington, DC is on all of our minds right now as we watch what is happening there politically. It’s been a while, but I lived in DC and worked for the Smithsonian for two years. I moved with my then husband to the Capitol Hill neighborhood, just 3 blocks from the Library of Congress and the Capitol building. My memories of DC are lots of walking, heightened security everywhere including installation of bollards in front of buildings, tourists who don’t know how to use crosswalks, and the odd sensation that the people in the restaurant next to me know state secrets.
I loved it. I loved the people I encountered (even some tourists), the atmosphere, the opportunity to work in and enjoy all of the museums and other cultural aspects in such close proximity. The mood in DC was intense from the cultural upheaval of the 9/11 and anthrax attacks. Lots of construction and defense logistics happening everywhere to shore up our national buildings including the National Mall where most of the Smithsonian buildings reside. At that time, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) was under construction just steps from the Capitol Building and so was the Udvar-Hazy Center, the extension of the Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport. Both of these projects were exciting and brought a new energy to the Mall and the Institution as everyone looked to the Earth and sky — or past, present and future — from different cultural perspectives.
The National Mall
As Americans, DC is our cultural center and the National Mall is the center of that center. From book festivals to kick ball leagues to inauguration day to Smithsonian sponsored festivals that bring in people from all over the world, the National Mall is the living, breathing center of our cultural universe. It’s a gathering space for all to see and be seen. It belongs in our history books as one of the best things we could have done for our country because it connects all of us. It’s where we come to enjoy, sometimes fight, get along, see the differences our country has to offer, see the joy in each other’s sense of time and space. The National Mall is where we experience belonging as a nation, where we come together in unity, and then bring it back to our hometowns as individuals who serve the collective. We serve each other in big ways and small through our own sensibilities and our own time, not to be servants, but to help, come to each other’s aid, belong as we all belong.
The National Mall also brings other types of energy to it.
Protests abound and the most disturbing to me while living there was the anti-abortion protests, not just because of their ideology, but also because of how they treated the environment. They left death and destruction in their wake in the form of trash and litter all over the National Mall — our nation’s front porch — and surrounding streets. Public trash cans overflowed like their anger, with coffee cups, paper napkins and other discarded materials. Large signs on posts with disturbing images of fetuses meant to scare people were left on the ground for others to pick up, let someone else handle it. It was like they forgot the environment is here to support us and that we are all endangered if we don’t look after it. Protests in DC also disregard the people that live and work there, who have to be somewhere on time so they can make a living. People blocked traffic on the Wilson Bridge by lying down on it or jammed the streets to keep people from moving. It’s an often used device to get attention, but it just makes people infuriated with no love and no room or energy to understand why the protest is even happening.
Still, I enjoyed my time there, perhaps a little doe-eyed of the whole experience, but it was magical for me to live in that city and work for an institution that I admire. Though not a historian or museum curator, I worked for a now defunct arm of the Smithsonian that included the magazine, museum stores, and other money-making parts of it that support the institution’s long-standing belief in the right for all people to access knowledge free of charge; our collective divine life force energy in complete harmony with our government. It works because we are a collective of free people with our own interests, our own ways of moving through the world, including our own divine life force energy that puts us in a creative mood or gives us the impetus to move forward in our lives.
The State of Things
That’s what is happening right now in DC — the impetus to move forward. I know it looks like a shit-show and in many ways it is, but it’s also true that we do not take change well or lightly. We like to know that we are safe and cared for, and when things start to change outside of our way of thinking, we can meltdown from non-understanding. Kind of like the virus that ripped through our world a few years ago. Nobody understood what was going on. We looked to our leaders who didn’t know what to do anymore than we did. We tried to find understanding in our hearts, but they were under attack too, not just from not being able to breathe, but from seeing our world fall apart both physically and metaphysically.
It was an Abraxas moment, which is a term I use from a Herman Hesse novel about a boy breaking out of his shell to become something new. We all have many Abraxas moments in our lives individually, but we also move through them collectively. They can be shocking, like when they’re forced on us in the case of 9/11, but they can also be about embracing the new. This Abraxas moment we’re moving through as a collective causes us to ask, “Was the old way serving us? How will we rise up to face the new in our lives as Americans who are ready for a change?”
Is higher education and the way it is structured really serving us? I think we have come to the realization, with so much debt forced on young people, or forcing adjunct instructors to work for less than minimum wage for their professional and educational knowledge that, no, higher education isn’t serving us the way it could or should. Perhaps it needs to be taken down a notch or two to show that money, government, and higher learning, comprised of the people who are only concerned with lining their pockets, needs to change. How it is happening is shocking, for sure. Why it is happening may be politically motivated, but it is happening all the same.
Now is the time to look to our future, not the past, to see how we can do things better. Maybe it’s about being lighter and brighter on our feet, not bogged down in hierarchy, bureaucracy, and red tape. How can we change our perspective to find newness exciting or thrilling, rather than being caught in the nostalgia of the past? It’s not fair that people are losing their jobs and it’s not fair that we can’t go about this in a more humane way, but what forces us to change isn’t beyond the scope of imagination, which we have in spades.