Washington Burning

I've been in the US for almost a week now, and I've never seen such extremes. The rich and poor are pretty sharply divided here, and it's not by geography. If nothing else, it's the levels of bitterness that seem to mark them out. And as a white woman travelling here, I seem to come in for my share of the bitterness. Because the poor are predominantly black or Latino. In the course of three days in Washington, I have been abused because I didn't respond to being called "white girl" by someone in a wheel chair who, I realised a few seconds too late, was asking me to open the door. I might have felt a whole lot worse about that had I not been laden with around 30kg of bags at the time, and barely able to walk myself. The other time was when L and I were walking through the apparently safe, upper class streets of Foggy Bottom, where we were yelled at across the street by a down and out drunk, who screamed that we were "white hos".

It's not restricted to race, or even locals though. Wandering the paths of Arlington Cemetery, a beautiful peaceful place the sheer scale of which is overwhelming, we came across a group of French teenagers on a school trip. I thought it was a strange place to take a school group, but as a way of getting across the nature of America's militarism, and the respect in which they hold the armed forces here, I guess there are few better places to go than a monument to the fallen that not only overlooks the national capital (not to mention the Capitol), but is within the grounds of a vanquished foe of the Union from the civil war. some of the French boys had outpaced their teachers and, when they didn't get a response to their question (in French) asking if we understood them, proceeded to follow us along the path with the continuous stream of filthy gutter slang that would have had their mothers washing their mouths out with soap, if not cuffing them across the back of the head. Because we do understand French, we just didn't realise they were talking to us when they asked.

But there you have Washington in summary; beautiful monuments and stunning settings, with the constant background hum that something isn't quite as full of pomp and circumstance as the politicians and public servants would like to believe. I guess it's like Canberra, but on a grander scale. And so are the social problems. Because everything in America is bigger than it is anywhere else, it stands to reason that the social and racial divides should be no different.