Of Bears and Penguins

The District of Columbia is, like any city, a living-breathing organism. A great deal more than intersecting streets, public transportation and interesting bits of history. It is a city driven by largely by image, prestige, intellect and ambition.

It's fit, young, has few smokers, is well educated. It's chockablock full of type-A folks who are out to change the world and who think they have a shot.

And some of the them work on Capitol Hill in the halls of legislative power. Other's work in the hallowed rooms of the White House. Still others in the oddly-reminiscent-of-Oz building that houses the Justice Department, or in the cloistered rooms of the Supreme Court.

Then there are the thinkers in the tanks - working for a legal group that specializes in a particular branch of constitutional law, working at the program that brings international students here to show them the good Ol' US of A, folks who are working on the environment, education, elevating morality, elevating liberty and, of course, elevating themselves.

There are the young graduate students studying medicine, or public policy or law. There are those just back from the Peace Corps, and those blackberry punching interns that work for the two-blackberry handling Chancellor of Schools.

There are the young ladies who light up the shops of Georgetown, and the cadre of young, beautiful and carefree who linger in the streets of Adam's Morgan and raise their glasses to the glorious cause and to themselves. Those who spend weekends toting their Ethos water bottles, kayaking on the Potomac, taking Sunday brunch and slugging back the mimosas and Bloody Marys.

And it is easy to linger in the perception that the young, the beautiful, the driven are what composes D.C. Full of people who look just like me, just the same, and they're always in front of that gleaming Capitol Dome, aren't they? And the sunlight glints off their sunglasses, and off the dome and it's pretty; it's the American dream.

But that's not the whole of D.C., not the whole story, and storytellers have got to tell it all, right?
So it is that in the gleaming city on the hill, where rest the pretty hopes and dreams of so many, where resides so much intellect, so much altruism, so much of the zeitgeist, reside also the invisible citizens of D.C.

Those born and raised and living there in the shadow of the dome. They are on K St NE where 6 were felled by gunfire, and on I St SE where two or three were roughed up and mugged, in Columbia Heights were names get crossed off a graffitied list of names on a brick wall. They are the residents of Trinidad, the neighborhood, not the country, who lived within police roadblocks that restricted all access to their community.

They are the residents of Anacostia, across the river, where the young, the beautiful, the idealistic do not go. Where there are no glittering shops, where there are no bars playing the understatedly-cool-hipster-anthem of the moment.

They are the children who attend a school where lights and windows are broken, where the heat doesn't work and the kids have to wear their coats during class, where there is violence and the threat of violence, and hunger and insecurity.

They are the children who wrote to President-Elect Obama and suggested that after he finished the war in Iraq, maybe he could help clean up Potomac Gardens, where they live.

Here in the shadow of the gleaming dome, the embodiment of the liberty we hold so dear, here are the parents who are trying to finish their GEDs, who are trying to find a tutor for their son who is about to enter the maw of secondary-education in the inner city. Here is the Aunt or the Grandma who is taking in the children because their mother has died. Here is the little boy in fourth grade who cannot recognize or write his name.

And you've probably guessed that the invisible part of D.C. doesn't look just the same as the golden, beautiful dreamers who think their golden, beautiful thoughts about changing the world, or winning the election, or getting the principal into the newscycle and perpetuating themselves just a bit longer.

It's easy for the two worlds never to cross. Two cities. One face that we show the world, and the other invisible, ignored, forgotten and discarded, way across the river, where the idealistic, the young, the beautiful, the glittering do not go. Talk about your lands of Oz.

But there a lot of non-profits that work precisely in that invisible city. They don't get reported on in the national media, and a lot of times the local media misses them too. They don't have operating budgets that reach into the stratosphere; they have donated space, and older computers, and toilets that they fix themselves. They are helping with the GEDs and the kids in Trinidad. They are working in Columbia Heights to end the violence. They are advocating in the school systems for their kids.

One in particular, a small one with a great deal of heart is providing a safe space in Potomac Gardens for the kids. This non-profit is making sure that the fourth grader is learning, and that the disparity in the school conditions is known, and above all this non-profit is loving those children every single day with a love that is so kind, and so big, and so unfailing that the kids just light up in it. In that love, for the smallest of moments, the kids shed their cares like their winter coats, and forget about the men who are dealing the drugs in the stairwells, and the sewers that are backing up into the apartments and the way they felt so hungry over the weekend.

It was a great victory last year, when that little-engine-that-could-of-a-non-profit landed two apartment units in the Gardens. Two units where the kids would have space - space for studying and cooking, for making music, and for playing. For wonderful, care-free, old-fashioned, American playing.

And to that end were donated tvs and game systems. I saw a picture of it in use just last week, four kids who from their imagination into reality shaped their bean-bag chairs into little racecars, and were sitting in the cockpits of their chargers, racing each other, competing in a version of Mariokart. And before someone starts asking why they're not using that time to study, let me just ask how much time you spend on Facebook playing "Farmville," and decompressing, and once you've answered that, go ahead and begrudge a ten-year old their 20 minutes of "chill time."

Earlier this weekend, while sunlight glinted of the pretty dome, while the young and the beautiful took their dogs to the park, or gamboled through the Eastern Market, while heels of dress shoes clicked down marble hallways, someone broke into those units at the Gardens, where the kids come everyday after school to do their homework, eat dinner, engage in choir, or cooking club, or hear a visitor talk about the career. That someone stole the three TVs, and four game systems that those kids played with, and looked forward to playing with and enjoyed.

Just another invisible crime that happened in an invisible city.

And the real kicker for me is that the closing accounts of the bar tab at that hipster-chic locale, the bill for that influential lunch, all those bloody-marys and all those mimosas over which so much reminiscing about the good-old days was done could easily cover the cost of replacing what was lost.

Some folks talk about a "real" America, in a tone of voice that reminds of me of a history teacher I had who said that the conquest of the New World could be boiled down to "God, gold and glory."

We're all in the shadow of the gleaming dome though, and the real America can be found in the chasm that separates the circles of power from the circles of the infernal poverty of the inner city, or rather in what it takes to cross it. Only in bridging that chasm first with attention, acknowledgement, and then compassion, and action will the true American dream - the one that Thomas Jefferson dreamed, the one that Lincoln and Truman and Dr. King dreamed, the one that Marian Anderson sang of, the one that the veterans yielded up their lives for - the dream of life and liberty for all men equal be realized.

Dear brothers, who will lead the charge across the gap?