On Occupied Capitol Hill

I took the trash bins to the curb and stared at the buzzing sky. The winter clouds are hiding the fact that the days are noticeably lighter now, but they aren't hiding the helicopters. The last time this happened I was in shorts and flip flops, but that time, the threat was the helicopters and the police and petty criminal opportunists. This time, six and a half months later, the threat is from homegrown terrorists, and we have to rely on those choppers and coppers to protect us.

I love living on Capitol Hill. I love telling people I live on Capitol Hill. I hate when "Capitol Hill" is used by the national media and Americans from other parts of the country as a substitute for talking about Congress and the politicians they send here. Now, I have only lived on the Hill for six of my eighteen years in DC, but I don't think I will ever live in another part of DC again. I like going to restaurants and spotting congressional representatives. I love walking past senators on the street and giving dirty looks to the ones I don't like. I live for chatting with journos in bars and staffers in cafes and DNC folks in hardware stores. I even loved the one time I got schooled in a bar by a Republican congressman who actually voted FOR the Affordable Care Act, whom I mistakenly criticized for voting against it.

But those are not common occurrences in quotidian life. What's normal is taking the trash bins to the curb on Sunday nights, going grocery shopping at the Harris Teeter, and saying hello to the neighbors walking their dogs while doing yard work. I love living on Capitol Hill because it is a neighborhood filled with good people, a sense of community, and worldly experience. You wouldn't know normal people live on the Hill by reading national media, however, as they generally ignore the people who live here for the fake glamour of politics. The reality is that Capitol Hill is like a small town, where you run into people you know at Frager's Hardware or Tunnicliff's Tavern or Mangialardo's or the post office, dry cleaners, or city park.

Now our lives are in an upheaval, with a cacophony of surveillance and patrol helicopters roaring overhead, the streets to get most anywhere off the Hill closed, and armed troops filling the pizza joints and burrito shops.

The weak-minded lowlifes of this country mired in the pit of their own mediocrity have turned our nation's capital into a conflict zone.

Anyone who knows me at all knows I have spent much of my adult life obsessed with conflict. From the moment in Luxembourg when the school took us to both the American and German WWII cemeteries to Dr. Haag's classes on the Third Reich and Cold War to the trips to Auschwitz, Dachau, and Theresienstadt to working at the peace and reconciliation center in Ireland and working in human rights and democratic governance in the Middle East to living and working in Beirut, I've been on the periphery of it all. Yet I've never been in it. The first time I went to Belfast was the day the Easter peace treaty was signed, and fortunately, nothing happened. I saw Egyptian soldiers patrolling the streets of Cairo the first time I went to the Middle East, but nothing happened there, either.

In Beirut, there is always the threat of conflict, but while I was there, nothing really happened. There were times of increased tension when the threat of conflict was real, but people went about their daily lives because they had to. I wrote this bit about the threat of renewed conflict nearly ten years ago from today:

A taxi sat parked on the side of a normally busy street in Beirut, one of the common beaten up old Mercedes that have somehow survived as everything in Lebanon has somehow survived. The driver, whose face was as worn out as his car, slumped behind the wheel as he filled the vehicle with cigarette smoke. In the backseat were two women passengers whose worried expressions told more tales than an entire library could ever teach you. The three of them were listening to the Prime Minister's speech on the radio. Further down in desolation, another driver sat with his car door open on a darkened corner, listening intently with a hardened face, a facade, for you could sense the truth of what he felt emanating from deep within him. Shopkeepers had televisions or radios tuned in, and you knew the blue lights glowing from the windows of houses had Hariri's oddly bearded face on TV screens.

The tone of the speech was uncharacteristically defiant as the normally weak leader challenged the militia that now threatens the (relative) stability his country. The pulse of the city itself was uncharacteristically slow. This was not the Beirut that has been featured in the travel sections of Western newspapers so many times over the last two years. No, this was the Beirut of history books.

You really have to be here to understand how it feels - the air, the atmosphere, I don't know how to describe it - but it is like there are supernatural forces at work. The feeling is something deep, like the whole universe, all of existence, all of time and space and history is inside you, and you can look inside the souls of people and see their fear in all its nakedness.

During daylight hours, one doesn't notice there is something dangerously wrong here, for the fruit vendors push their carts and the taxi drivers stand on the corners and the shawarma cooks sell their mouthwatering meat. The coffee shops are filled with studying students and elderly elders and housewives both covered and not, and people buy shoes and clothes and belts and other things they don't really need just as they always would. Incessant car horns, diesel-spewing generators, and construction workers shouting from great heights to the ground below still perform the dissonant symphony known as Beirut.

But with dusk come the demons and the ghouls who have haunted this land for many millennia. The streets have been emptier, never more noticeably than last night as Hariri spoke to put Hezbollah in a position where they'd have to take responsibility for any violence that may occur. And they are responsible. No one else is threatening violence. Everyone else is sick of it, sick, sick, sick. Everyone else wants to live normal lives. Everyone else wants a job, electricity, decent internet, and good schools for their kids. It isn't fair. It isn't fair to the innocent Lebanese who have suffered time and time again for the stupidity of a few.

 

And that's kind of what it feels like to live on Capitol Hill at this moment in time, except we don't have the wisdom of experience or the weathered fear; we have a worry cloaked in naivety and a little of that American arrogance that tells us it can't happen here, really, that last week was just an abberation. We try to reason with ourselves that the threat is exaggerated, but with every bit of news that drips out about what happened last week, our brains tell us that the threat is more serious than we know. We remember all the other times, the bombing in Nashville, Charlottesville, the Rittenhouse murders, cops killing Black Americans, the Pittsburgh synagogue, kids in cages, family separations, Muslim bans, the journalist killings, the explosion of hate crimes, and we know this is already a war they are waging.

I used to describe to people that living in Beirut was like "living IN the news" because of everything that happened in and around it. Well, I am definitely living IN the news again. I see their Jesus signs at their hate rallies and think of Hezbollah, the "party of God." I see their Trump flags and think of Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, whose fat face plasters walls across Lebanon. I see their guns and think of the green rifle on Hezbollah's yellow flag, appropriately colored for their cowardice. I see their homogeneity and I think of the tribalism that defines much of the world in conflict.

So we go about our daily lives on Capitol Hill and the rest of DC hoping that the minor security inconvenience is not for naught, hoping that we can nip this Trump-inspired nazi movement in the bud before it flourishes into a permanent part of the American cultural landscape. We're all losing sleep, though some won't admit it. We tell each other to be safe this week when we're purchasing wares in the local shops or passing by on the sidewalk. We've hung lights and signs in our yards professing our joy that the end of a nightmare could be coming to a close. 

But there is a darkness we just can't shake.