America's Dump

America sends its garbage to Washington and then blames the city when the stench wafts their way.

This Washington Post piece has been popular with the "at least you don't have to live with them" crowd, but because it was run under the Post Local heading it's not getting much play elsewhere. Also because no one gives a shit about the human beings who, you know, live here. Actual Washingtonians are, as I said when this masturbatory exercise got underway, an abstraction to most of the country. Granted, people are often abstractions when they live far enough away, but at least it's kind of fair to blame Texas for Ted Cruz. The District of Columbia, for reasons both arcane and childish, has no representation for itself. The only advantage to that situation is that Washingtonians are the only Americans who cannot share in the blame for any of this.

Not that it enures us from the shutdown. Just the opposite. We're the ones who live and work here, either for a government that legally prohibits us from working, or for a business that's suffering because federal employees' cash is no longer flowing their way (each had been hit badly enough by the sequester). Even those of us not directly impacted know people who are: friends and family who are angry, bitter, and bored, and who will receive back pay... eventually. In the meantime, they get to deal with the psychic impact of being forbidden from doing their jobs. For an area that has a lot of people who chose to go to work serving their country, that's no small thing.

But it's, "Washington," sneered through the fat lips of the ill-informed, that's the problem.

Example: a group of truckers thinks it'll be a good idea to "shutdown the Beltway" this weekend. The plan, near as I can tell, involves driving slowly around the Beltway for the duration of the three-day weekend, blaring their horns and generally forcing all and sundry to listen to their loud irritation with the present state of affairs. For those not familiar with DC's geography, the "Beltway" is I-495, a highway that branches I-95 into a loop around (not through) the District. It's an important road for drivers in the area and we all hate it. Here's the kicker: the politicians to be protested aren't using it. Many of them stay here on weekends and those that don't have little use for 495, anyway (Reagan National Airport is inside the Beltway). Capitol Hill will not hear your sirens. And I promise Obama will have no use for the road this weekend, either: he has a helicopter. The only people this punishes are the people who live here and who will need to get somewhere. They are the ones who will bare the brunt of the frustration of people who, in line with the inconvenient realities of democracy, are at least partly responsible for our terrible, terrible government.

As if it wasn't bad enough getting bullied by the self-serving, under-qualified, assclown members of Congress who manufactured the problem. Members sent here entirely by other people.

We, as a nation, have to live with the mistakes of the American voter. Some more intimately than others. Washingtonians don't ask for an apology (apologies mean more when they're volunteered); just an acknowledgement of that fact. And for everyone else to stop lumping them in with the other people's refuse.