The Tale of Barbed Wire
January 19, 2017, my mom and I ate dinner in the shadow of the Capitol the day before a presidential inauguration. We sat on the west side of the Capitol on the steps of a statue now hidden behind a 12-foot fence topped with the barbed wire staring up at the inauguration stage and knew things were about to change – for the worse. We poured one out for democracy and I pessimistically remarked, “I feel like it’s all going to burn to the ground” to which my mom, ever the optimist replied, “we’re going to have to fight like hell to make sure it doesn’t.” At the time I meant our democracy would burn to the ground in a metaphorical and legislative way rather than a literal insurrectionist mob invading the Capitol with enough ammunition to kill everyone in the building five times over.
January 6, 2021, my pessimistic musings almost came to life during the Capitol Siege where rioters could have easily burn it all down. Even though the sight of thousands of predominantly white Americans storming the Capitol was one of the most astounding things to behold in several generations many in the Republican Party would like to quickly shove under the rug along with the Trail of Tears and the Jim Crow Era. As I watched the horrifying images of white supremacists invade the Capitol with ease many things crossed my mind—horror, disgust, anger but one emotion that assuredly did not cross my mind was surprise. When I heard newscasters lament “this is not America” I wondered what America they lived in. I saw the insurrection as a grotesque representation of is exactly who America is and always has been, a nation founded on white supremacist violence. We just got better at couching violent white supremacy in catchy phrases like “The Southern Strategy” before the rise of 45.
Lincoln Park January 20, 2021
The intelligence community utterly failed that day to take white domestic terrorism seriously and there was decisive action to not repeat that mistake on Inauguration Day. Walking through my Capitol Hill neighborhood in the days leading up to the inauguration was jarring. The police and military presence seemed to increase by the moment with border patrol in the parks and cop cars on nearly every corner. Heavily armed guardsmen walking alongside moms with babies in strollers.
The Capitol alert system went off after a fire broke out in an encampment and it sounded like something straight out of The Hunger Games. A disembodied voice telling us that the Capitol was on high alert accompanied by a disconcerting alarm. Everyone in a 2 block radius heard the alarm but proceeded about their day as if it were church bells. The chorus of low-level sirens that rang out day and night, reminded you that the country is in the midst of an uncivil war. Witnessing the rapid militarization made me realize how fortunate I was to grow up in Cleveland. The hyper-militarization felt unfamiliar, unsettling, and quite frankly frustrating. Unfamiliar and unsettling because the military was in my face in a way I had never experienced. Frustrating because the militarization and proposed permeance of the fencing around the Capitol was a reaction to not taking the treat white terrorism seriously in the first place. Instead of following the lead of ordinary Washington citizens who read Twitter and preemptively decided not to leave the house on January 6th due to the very real threat of white supremacist violence intelligence leaders such as the Capitol Police Chief turned a blind eye to white hate—turned a blind eye to one one of the most pervasive, persistent and destructive forms of domestic terrorism in American history.
After the Capitol doors were breached it feels like the response is further fortification promoted by the and a feigned forgetfulness by those with a blood lust for power rather than systemic change. Yes, there are those who seek real consequences for responsible parties but the Senate Republicans defacto exoneration of Trump is a disheartening reality we all know too well. That insidious truth that there may be few consequences for the vast majority of the insurrectionist and their powerful allies besides Twitter bans and carving out the middle of the city with unscalable fences and barbed wire.
This is a pattern I have seen throughout my life as institutions crumble before our eyes.
As much as I would like to say my sentiment “I feel like it’s all going to burn to the ground” was born just out of 45’s rise, in reality, it has been something I have felt for over half of my life. Millennials were sold a bill of false goods, a belief that an economically sustainable lifestyle was possible if we just followed the right path. As a politician’s child, I was also raised to have faith in government. Don’t get me wrong there were definitely corrupt politicians my parents warned me about (we’ll get to that later) but overall, I was told to believe in the government and believe that politicians cared about their constituents. However, the older I got the more I realized we weren’t handed the romanticized America of the 1990s but a dumpster fire with tinder added every moment.
Views while walking the dog Jan 20
In high school alone there was a walkout protest against the Iraq War, I had a teacher say goodbye to the American education system due to the No Child Left Behind Act, another told us we had about 50 good years on the planet, and of course a school shooting drill. When I graduated in 2007 the subprime mortgage crisis was already ravaging through neighborhoods in Cleveland such as Slavic Village only to take down the global economy less than a year later. We watched as banks received bailouts and banking criminals got let off with a baby tap on the wrist while the middle-class atrophied and the only people employed upon graduation went into banking or tech. So many of my peers chose life-sucking hig- paying jobs to pay off student loan debt or were underemployed for months as the job market remained to stagnate. I watched as Ohio democratic insiders told me that Hillary was going to lose in July of 2016 in part due to her ineffective strategy in the middle only to be told by Washington insiders my information was outdated, irrelevant or patently incorrect. I watched as one climate disaster tore through the nation while oil and gas companies pushed for more pipelines.
I feel like most of my life has been watching the American empire crumble under the weight of its own hypocrisy, greed and racism.
The moment I truly knew I was watching the beginning of an end was the spring of 2011 when I read an article that for the life of me I cannot find which compared the rise of the Kardashians to the rise of Roman Gladiator culture and how they represented the impending fall of the U.S. Empire. The piece discussed how Roman Gladiator culture distracted citizens with the beauty, fame and gore of the Gladiators while the leaders pilfered the coffers and spent lavishly on the military. Political rot began to define the ruling class and a lack of faith in leadership caused disunion in the masses. The author forewarned that America’s growing distraction with the false veneer of social media beauty combined with the inglorious military budget and economic wealth gap could lead to the fall of the American empire. As I sat in Mallott Commons at Scripps College reading this article I remember thinking damn I think this guy is right, something bad is coming I just don’t know what yet.
A tale of 2 Americas—the military guarding the Capitol and an encampment feet away
In the years since I read that article the wealth gap exploded, school shootings multiplied, and open displays of white supremacist domestic terrorism exponentiated. The unchecked power of social media funneled people into silos as CEOs defended their inaction. I saw Congress become a grotesque imitation of effective governance where the Republican party is solely driven by the need for power and willing to sacrifice anything at the devil’s altar of the “principles” of free-market capitalism. With every mass shooting event, one side perpetually argued for more guns, more metal detectors, more military, spewed harmful false flag narratives only to scream when they actually had to pass through the same metal detectors they promote in kindergartens.
January 6th made me enraged and seeing the barbed wire fences draped across impossibly high fences feels like a daily reminder that white supremacist terrorists were able to trot on in like they owned the place because the intelligence community systematically failed to view white people as dangerous. It serves as a grotesque reminder that there are Congressmen and women today who supported, amplified, and fueled the insurrection are walking through the halls with bravado spitting hate and violence at their colleagues of color. People that sowed nothing but derision and falsehoods remain in power under the false guise of a contrived dishonest unity. It serves as a reminder that Republican leadership doesn’t the ovaries to stand up against violent extremists, they would rather tacitly support terrorism and write new laws to suppress the vote. Getting stuck on one side of the fences makes me frustrated, angry and tired—we have been listening to the same tune of white supremacist violence for generations and just because it has switched from the gramophone to the iPhone it is somehow each time it erupts people are surprised, saddened then quick to placate it.
The Capitol at Night
The fencing feels like a band-aid on a severed limb. Although it is necessary for the moment allowing it to be a permanent solution would just let that wound fester and grow. Allowing it to remain does not address the enemy within. It requires bravery to debride to a festered severed limb and eradicate the infection. Courage to remember and see. Courage to see what white supremacist violence has done and is doing to our nation. Courage to remember the hard truths brushed off because it feels easier ignore them. Strength to abolish broken and corrupt systems, a strength that goes beyond an anti-racist book club, a strength that forces you to question where you stand within those systems. If you shouted out “this is not America” on January 6th, what America were you seeing—and more importantly what America were you ignoring?
I believe that there is hope to salvage a broken nation. Hope that exists beyond fencing, barbed wire, and bulletproof vests. Hope that something will change, that this time we will remember and see. Admittedly when I see the Senate Republicans turn a blind eye to dangerous lunatics within their ranks that hope is tested. But I believe there is hope—because I believe the prophetic words Amanda Gorman gave us on inauguration day:
“For there is always light,
if only we're brave enough to see it
If only we're brave enough to be it”
Photos of Capitol Hill January 16-21, 2020
All photos with the active military in the neighborhood areas are from days leading up to and including January 20, 2021. Fencing still stands as of February 1, 2021.
