A typical low-income neighborhood in DC.
WASHINGTON, DC – What I needed was a little yeast. My roommate had come home with a bread making machine – frustrated that he had succeeded only in making a giant crouton, someone donated the machine to the charity where she works – and I was determined, on this Saturday afternoon, to bake my first loaf of bread. Most ingredients were already around the kitchen. What I needed was a little yeast.
In my blighted Washington, D.C. neighborhood locating yeast is not a simple proposition. I went first to the “grocery store” a few blocks away. I scoured the dusty aisles of knock-off cereal, juice mix and canned pseudo-vegetables like collard greens and baked beans, to find, as I expected, that there was no yeast to be found.
As I crossed the street a young man, 20ish, approached me. Clearly nervous, he asked where Metro Center was.
“It’s around here, right?” he snorted.
“No.” I said, hardly suppressing a laugh. Not even close.
When this kid wandered onto my street he doubled the white population in the immediate vicinity at that moment. It wasn’t an accident that he picked me among the 50 or so people standing around to ask for directions.
I remember that sensation, the shame of feeling insecure in an almost exclusively black, economically depressed neighborhood. I gave him directions for riding the bus to the nearest metro stop, from where he could get to Metro Center. He opted to walk, a familiar distaste for riding the public bus betrayed by his nervous eyes.
Continuing in my yeast search, I made the rounds of all the convenience stores in my area, where clerks shrouded in bulletproof Plexiglass peddle beer and cheetos, and things related thereto (cigarettes, paper towels, tums, etc.). No dice.
Discouraged but not defeated, I set out for the new grocery store a mile down the road. Days ago a Metro-Transit Authority worker was shot and killed in the area. A mile in the other direction a woman heading home from cleaning houses all day was stabbed to death at a bus stop.
When I finally reached the Safeway I had to check my pulse – had I died and gone to heaven? Rows of fresh produce glistened under mood lights, water droplets like tiny stars flickering in a universe of green. Tomatoes, sweet potatoes, fruit from around the world, and there it all was, liberated; these veggies would never see the inside of a can.
I retrieved my yeast, and about 10 other items I suddenly decided I needed, paid up, returned home, and baked a marginally successful load of bread.
If what I needed to get my bread growing was a little yeast then my neighborhood needs another class of growth agent: pork.
When the those esteemed white men wrote the constitution they could never have foreseen that Foggy Bottom, the swamp on the Potomac where General Washington chose to make his capitol, would one day become a bustling metropolis with a culture and a pulse all its own. Administration of this unhappy federal district was the province of Congress. There would be no Congressman or Senator from the seat of the federal government.
Over the next two centuries the population of the capitol grew dramatically, and in 1961 residents were finally given three votes in the Electoral College. In 1975, Washingtonians were allowed to elect their first-ever mayor and city council. Yet D.C., with a population greater than Wyoming’s and roughly equal to Vermont’s, has no voting representation in the U.S. House or the Senate.
Pork barrel spending gets a bad rap, considered by many the paragon of government waste and special interest influence. It’s an easy gripe to make when your congressman is bringing home the bacon.
While Washingtonians pay District of Columbia taxes, they, unlike residents of American colonies like Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa, who also lack a vote in Congress, are subject to all federal taxes. A line on the license plate issued by the District of Columbia rightly echoes the cry of our founding patriots: “TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.”
It shouldn’t be hard to come up with a little yeast in any major American city – while a mile to the nearest grocery store is no problem for a strapping lad like myself, the same distance is considerably more formidable for the elderly and disabled in the mostly-carless urban landscape. Maybe what’s been missing from D.C., what has kept swaths of our capitol low on economy and high on crime, has been the absence of a representative with proverbial teeth in the legislature. After all, even with a seat at the table, it’s impossible to digest any pork without the teeth to take a bite.
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
