In the Underbelly of Power
Working in Washington, DC
Written in May 2018.
All I needed to know about working in DC,
I learned on a leadership conference in 2003. On the last day, we students were bussed to Lafayette Square to view the White House in all of its majesty. My picture taking, however, was interrupted by the increasing volume of a fellow high schooler in my cohort whom I knew to be an outspoken, New England Republican. He boasted a different suit every day, while I fumbled with cotton skirts and pastel cardigans.
The teen was loudly arguing with an elderly woman sitting in front of a small hut about six feet in diameter and covered in tarps as if an urban igloo. She was soapboxing about peace and nuclear nonproliferation, as she did every day and night from that same spot. She seemed ‘not all there’ so to speak, though she made up for it with her passion and vocal projection.
The seventeen year old began debating and berating her. It was his opinion that she was wrong and that she was crazy, and he felt he needed to be the one to aggressively inform her of this.
He perceived his power over her was clear.
He was educated. He was male. He came from the right kind of family, and he wore the right kind of clothes. Other conference-goers joined him in jeering at this elderly woman who was camped for her cause in the freezing February temperatures.
What was wrong with promoting peace? I wondered. I tried meagerly to convince the young man to show respect to this complete stranger. I wanted to ask him why he thought he was more righteous, more important, more patriotic than her.
I didn’t understand the complexities of power then, but I did understand the complexity of humanness.
I reflected on this as the group of teenage men marched off loudly singing “My Country Tis of Thee” in a pathetic victory over a disaffected woman trying to make change in her own weird way.
Born in the Midwest to a kind Republican family, I completed my Bachelor’s degree in the West and graduated with a degree in what should probably have been called liberalism and protest activism.
My classmates and I coordinated protests in Union Square, San Francisco. We called for American retailers to stop using sweatshop labor. We marched for Palestinian rights with black and white keffiyehs wrapped around our shoulders. We believed we were changing the world.
Upon graduation, it seemed natural to move to our nation’s capital, the bastion of democracy.
With my political science degree in hand, I had my ambitious career all planned out.
I hate the phrase “coming of age,” but I cannot describe my first attempt at adulthood in any other way. The year was 2008. The country’s economic bottom had just dropped out, and I was renting a tiny room in Capitol Hill. It was clear to the other residents of greater Washington that I was a newcomer. I smiled eagerly at people on the Metro. I started friendly conversations. I donned bright skirts, bohemian jewelry, and floral headbands which I had cut from patterned fabric.
While jobseeking, I encountered those with position titles of “Senior” and “Founder” with their respective diplomas hanging on every office wall. University rankings appeared in daily newspapers which the commuting men in black overcoats glanced through while frowning. I looked for a job with hope at first, and then, not at all.
Cold hard apathy penetrated where the hope once lived.
I was completely disaffected by the culture of the East Coast, and of DC, specifically. I recalled the conference I had attended in Washington while in high school. During those five days, “the nametag phenomenon” was born into my lexicon. I realized the elastic cords hanging uniformly from everyone’s necks signified everything. They were the titular prizes of our modern society.
At the start of my second year in DC, I succumbed to the requisite Capitol Hill internship completed by (seemingly) every transplant Washingtonian. [Photo by Kelly Flanagan]
I realized few care. In the morning light atop of the metro’s escalator every single day, there was an impassioned protest waiting for my coworkers and me. Day in and day out, the protestors chanted enthusiastically and shoved flyers at the commuters. One day the protest was about abortion, another day it was Obamacare, and another was some niche concern that I had never heard of. They came from every state. The protestors thought they were changing minds and influencing policy makers. Being on the other side of my past lifestyle, I finally understood (probably a lot later than I should have) that none of it matters.
Maybe this was when I realized I could not defeat the jaded malaise of the city, and I started to conform.
Each morning my new identity was birthed underground… and exposed to the crisp air atop the Capitol South metro station. That floral hippy inside of me was slowly silenced in favor of “reality,” a cold masculine reality where women’s suit jackets were designed to look and feel like that of men’s, and where no one cared about my ideas at all.
That was ten years ago,
and I still live in the District. In that time, I completed graduate school at one of those institutions of rank, and I no longer smile with ease. I wear gray clothes, and bestow respect at conferences to those who may recommend me for a job, or whom I may call to advance my career at some future date. I am one of the nametags. In a fresh intern’s eyes, I have made it. I can name drop my diplomas and discuss the intricacies of Middle Eastern conflict. I can make informed small talk about political current events complete with witty asides.
Often, this kind of thing makes people feel important. They submerge themselves in awe from the “less accomplished.” They swim in a pool of their own importance, showing up with Gucci watches or diamond tennis bracelets at certain restaurants where they know they will be seen. I learned the fickleness of power while reaching adulthood in the crucible of our nation’s capital.
The prestige and poise of the powerful is completely transparent. I am aware their self-importance is dependent on the capriciousness of something much like a nineteenth century courtship. Who happens to be in power? Who happens to have money? Who happens to be from the appropriate family or lineage?
As for me, I still cavort amongst the rich and the homeless in the streets of the US capital. Outwardly, I may appear a successful or at least run of the mill Washingtonian. But inwardly, I wear a ragged fabric headband and carry protest signs like Ms. Picciotto, who from her urban igloo in Lafayette Square carried on the longest continuous act of political protest in US history until her death in 2016.[i]
Still, I maintain a quiet hope for a political renaissance in society.
So after Trump came to the White House, so did I… with half a million others for the Women’s March on January 21, 2017.[ii] I have never seen downtown DC in such a complete state of chaos.
Beautiful, fantastic, and Peaceful chaos.
On that day there were no buses running their scheduled routes on K Street. The stoplights changed colors for nobody. All cars naïve enough to try to drive downtown on such a day were stopped indefinitely at intersections, not excluding any black car with government plates.
Protestors had suspended time and power throughout the entirety of downtown DC. We workers substituted our daily business attire for jeans and pink knit hats. We marched up 15th St. NW on a modified protest route set to accommodate the incredible number of women, men, and children who had climbed out of those dark Metro escalators and into a new light.
That day, my dueling identities began to converge,
and I felt like maybe I do fit into DC. Not in the way that my clothing matches the local garb enough to remain unnoticed, but in the way my ideas are no longer silenced. It feels like a nascent paradigm shift in which individuals matter.
As this shift in power occurs, those losing power grasp onto it desperately and recklessly. They intensify their jargon so as to avert attention from the inevitable, so as to push it off as long as possible.
As when a nation is falling from its preeminent position in the world, this is a period of severe instability.[iii] There is a higher risk of disruption and violence than at any other time.
It is during the fall of the powerful when they lash out most.
While awaiting the fate of the dark suits
who tenuously hold onto imagined superiority, we the masses await opportunity. We stay alert in this time of transition. This time of stalemate. This time of shut down. We wait in anticipation as the powerbrokers put forward their bluff.
—
Works Cited
[i] Edsall, Thomas B. “Trump is Trying to Bend Reality to His Will.” The New York Times, 29 July 2020.
[ii] Stein, Perry, Steve Hendrix and Abigail Hauslohner. “Women’s marches: More than one million protesters vow to resist President Trump.” The Washington Post, 22 January 2017.
[iii] Houweling, Henk, and Jan G. Siccama. “Power Transitions as a Cause of War.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 32, №1, March 1988.
