Isle Storm: D.C.: Cherry Blossoms and Heartburn

First view of the U.S. Capital from aboard the Palmetto.

I'm arriving in our nation's capital for less than 24 hours as I train my way back up the eastern seaboard. I'm feeling sad, somewhat disassociated, which is odd as I'm on my way home from a terrific visit with one of my oldest and best friends.

It's the capital building itself. It sends a direct current through my heart, creating a sharp burn from the moment the crown of its dome pops into view.

The cherry-lined shore of the Potomac.

From Fredericksburg to Alexandria, VA, Amtrak's Palmetto line runs up the Potomac. It is a big river, wide and throaty brown, but not as long as Virginia's famed James River. With its headwaters in the western Appalachian Mountains beyond the Blue Ridge, the James -- originally the Powhatan, like those who lived here for thousands of years pre-colonization -- brought in ever increasing numbers of British colonialists and took out tobacco, the labor intensive and soil killing export that made the settlements, with the labor of enslaved peoples, economically viable. The James dumps into the Chesapeake at the large, protected harbor of Newport News/Hampton Roads: a place I've never been but know as the primary competitor for the New England sub- and ship-building Navy towns around which I grew up and still reside.

D.C.'s fabulous cherries are in bloom along the Potomac, the Tidal Basin, and every street. Yet just as in my previous post about the desert, the burning pain in my heart vies with all this beauty for my attention.

I'm a product of the school of American Exceptionalism: I was taught to believe and accepted as reality that the U.S. is different from other nations, that our values and political systems are unique in history such that it is our destiny to lead.

A magnificent old cherry propped up outside the Library of Congress.

I believed it about our country and, as a citizen of this country, about myself as well.

I took off the rosy glasses about myself at 14, about the time when many, teetering on adolescence, do.

My first muse and champion, my Grandmother Mary, had died several years earlier. Fourteen was the age at which I first quit the Catholic Church and understood myself to be a lesbian. None of this fit the radiantly perfect image of who I was intended to be.

By 1975 I'd also had to adjust my rosy lenses in regard to the country. I wore a leather peace sign around my neck and had completed my high school prep watching the Watergate trials and Nixon's resignation.

Yet still, my "city on a hill" syndrome of romantic nationalism persisted. Once it gets its barbed hooks under your skin, removal can be difficult and painful.

In 1978, on our junior class trip to D.C., my first views of the Capital Rotunda, the Lincoln and Jefferson and Washington Memorials, the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court awed me with their grandiose aesthetic portrayals of our "uniquely" American values.

Even the first Presidential election in which I was able to vote in 1980 -- with an apparently rigged Iranian hostage crisis, devastated cities and rampaging inflation working together to sink President Jimmy Carter, the most moral politician I knew -- didn't manage to put the final nail in a coffin that was almost but not completely sealed for me.

There have been thousands of nails added since. And still, I held onto something -- can I call it hope? -- until January 6, 2021 and the assault of armed citizens on the Capital building in an attempt to overturn a legitimate election.

Let's not kid ourselves. While the coverup of and gaps in the teaching of American history are very thorough, at some point most of us are forced to accept that a nation built on genocide, land theft, and enslaved labor is rotten at its core.

What some of us keep hoping for -- followers of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others -- is that our efforts for change will create opportunities for redemption.

I'll keep working for #justice, for #love. But the sight of the capital dome, and the memories of armed hordes assaulting Capital police desecrating symbols of our democratic ideals, is now a shot of direct current that burns my heart.