After a gourmet lunch of a polish sausage and some pop in front of the Federal Reserve building, I continued on my somewhat diagonal journey that would lead me eventually to the Metro Center station.
The Ellipse is directly south of the White House and stands between it and the Washington Monument. A fair heap of it has been turned into an overflow car park for workers at the White House and Executive Office Building but at least the meadow is still reasonably open.
There’s a lot of construction round the perimeter of the White House including large white panels obscuring the view of the President’s home. But despite that, there was a very real sense that the White House is not the lone bunker/fortress under siege that it seemed during the previous administration last August.
There was a very different vibe in the area and it was palpable.
When I asked a kind woman kitted out in Secret Service tactical gear if we could ever expect the White House to be visible as the symbol of the peaceful transfer of executive power ought to be, she did mention that E-street (the street outside the south fence in these pictures) will likely never re-open but that the white panels should come down once the construction is complete.
I rather hope that comes to pass.
Washington DC was designed to impress if not intimidate foreign heads of state and monarchs. It was never meant to seem like an armed bunker fighting off the impending zombie apocalypse!
I didn’t even try to get near the Capitol knowing it’d been locked down very recently and that the barricades and barriers erected after the insurrection of 06 Jan 2021 were still very much in place and in evidence. But I suspect even then I would feel the same sense of relief and releasing of the held breath over there that I was feeling near the White House.
And if that vibe is anything to go by, I have hope that our country will eventually find it’s way out of the darkness.
