EDITORIAL/OPINION

Send Your Feedback, Questions or Concerns, Tips and Suggestions to editorial@georgetowner.com or call 202-338-4833

This Is Not Who We Are. Or Is it?

We are writing this while the murder trial of Derek Chauvin is underway in Minneapolis. The evidence presented so far is even more terrible than what we saw last May 25, a dark day in an already tumultuous year, marked by an impeachment trial, a fatally mismanaged pandemic and weeks of protests — some peaceful, others not.

Fast-forward 10 brutal months and #BlackLivesMatter has morphed into #StopAsianHate. Yet another ethnic group — Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders — is being subjected to unconscionable acts of racial prejudice. According to Stop AAPI Hate, hate crimes against Asians rose 149 percent between 2019 and 2020. The organization received almost 3,800 reports of hateful incidents during the pandemic, a number that Stop AAPI Hate believes is likely on low side. (Such crimes are generally underreported, for a variety of reasons.) And most victims, like those killed in Atlanta on March 16, are women.

It would be easy to blame “the former guy” for this repellent turn of events. His repeated use of “Kung Flu” and “China Virus,” not to mention all the other insults he aimed at women, people from communities of color and anyone of any ethnicity who challenged his authority, surely influenced susceptible individuals to take action against those they had long distrusted or disliked.

It’s human nature. Tribalism is in our DNA, a relic from more primitive and perilous times. And we all — even the most compassionate and open-minded of us — harbor unconscious, implicit biases that reveal themselves when we feel vulnerable, afraid or overwhelmed. (You can test for your own biases vis-a-vis a host of issues and groups at Project Implicit.)

It’s also American nature. We have lofty goals and mythic tales about our exceptionalism, but racial intolerance is in the nation’s DNA, too. Our country was founded on aggression, built on slavery and flourished through both the exploitation and demeaning of “the other.” Systemic racism has run a parallel course with the Enlightenment principles that gave us the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

We don’t know what emboldens people to act with impunity toward people they don’t even know. That’s a question best left to philosophers, social scientists and clerics. What we do know is that, if we truly believe we’re better than this, if we truly want America to be a “city on a hill,” we need to accept that we have a long, long way to climb.

Love Your Mother, Earth

After four-plus years of denialism and magical thinking, the future of our planet is once again taking center stage in the White House and around the world. Instead of more hot air, we may expect to see some meaningful science-based recommendations for mitigating environmental devastation.

This month’s cover story focuses on Earth Day, April 21. Christopher Jones covers the waterfront of climate change and the existential challenges it poses, from hotter and longer wildfire seasons to more violent, rain-soaked hurricanes, along with rising temperatures, invasive pests and new diseases. The impact all this is having — and will have, especially with continued inaction — on our health and well-being is sobering.

Jones provides some scary stats, showing how Washington, for all its power and prestige, is not immune to the threat. Speaking hyperlocally, we’ve already experienced flooding downtown and on Georgetown streets, as well as sudden, intense storm activity (remember the derecho?). And we can expect more heat — and cold — emergencies as temperature extremes become more common. For those with asthma, especially children, or heart disease, this is very bad news. Vulnerable populations, both human and animal, will be hit hardest.

But there is hope. According to former Council member Tommy Wells, who now directs the District’s Department of Energy & Environment, D.C. “believes in science” and is ambitiously pursuing all manner of sustainable solutions to the climate crisis. Among them: building out solar energy use, boosting alternative modes of transportation (scooters, streetcars, bikes) and expanding the tree canopy.

“Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” Voltaire famously observed, “we must cultivate our garden.” Something to remember — not just on Earth Day but every day.

Are you a digital nomad or do you know someone who is?

YOUR OPINION MATTERS. Post your response. Facebook.com/TheGeorgetowner

Layer of Annoyance Surfaces at ANC Meeting

What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate

BY PEGGY SANDS

The usually very solicitous GeorgetownBurleith advisory neighborhood commissioners, who often thank one other and the various District government officials who address them, showed a subsurface layer of annoyance at the monthly ANC meeting on March 30.

To begin with, presenters from the District Department of Transportation — which had two items on the agenda: the 37th Street bike lane and work on Rose Park’s multi-use trail — were asked repeatedly to keep their presentations short. (The crime report at this meeting lasted almost half an hour; the past two meetings, starting at 6:30 p.m., went on until nearly 10 p.m.) They didn’t.

DDOT was also involved in controversies related to at least two other agenda items: unregistered motorized vehicles on city streets and a possible change to the agency’s approach regarding brick sidewalk maintenance.

The latter elicited an unusually droll memory from ANC Chair Rick Murphy. He recalled that, in August of 2017, former Commissioners Jim Wilcox and Joe Gibbons (and Gibbons’s dog, Scout) physically blocked DDOT contractors from paving over a portion of Georgetown’s sidewalks at 30th and Dumbarton Streets. Now, it seems, the unwanted surface may be foisted on Georgetown’s treasured brick sidewalks again, without any warning or notice to the ANC.

Commissioner Gwen Lohse’s resolution on the illegal motorized vehicles requested responses not only from DDOT but from the District Department of Motor Vehicles and the Metropolitan Police Department, which she expects immediately.

Even the very favored National Park Service came in for some grumpiness regarding a construction project. The commissioners

The dissatisfaction with government agencies’ transparency and communication efforts expressed at the March 30 Georgetown-Burleith advisory neighborhood commission meeting were still in evidence a week later.

On April 6, during the first town-hall meeting concerning the modernization of Ellington Field on 39th Street, the Department of Parks and Recreation’s community liaison, Tommie Jones — after two hours of presenting on the planning process and fielding numerous questions welcomed the initial fencing off of the pathway from M to P Streets along the steep east edge of Rose Park, after 10 years of pointing out its dangerous conditions. But the work was planned and begun without the ANC being notified or its input sought.

The biggest complaints of ghosting were saved for the Department of Parks and Recreation, however, whose outreach officer Tommie Jones is well known to all the commissioners — and to most everyone involved in the long-evolving redesign of the Jelleff Recreation Center.

The reconstruction of Jelleff is a top priority of Ward 2 Council representative Brooke Pinto, who supports the idea of doubling or even tripling the original 2021 budgeted allocation of $7 million to make the building ADA compliant, including renovations that would transform Jelleff into more of a community hub. But none of the results of the surveys and town-hall meetings — notably a proposal to demolish the entire building and build a new one with a larger, reconfigured swimming pool — was referenced in the feasibility study that DPR announced had been finalized.

“Using 100s of thousands of tax dollars, DPR has been conducting a ‘feasibility study’ by Perkins Eastman/PE who always said they would include all correspondence from residents,” Commissioner Elizabeth Miller wrote The Georgetowner, clearly angered. “But DPR is refusing to include in their report, a community letter signed by three civic organizations including Georgetown Village and passed by our ANC unanimously.”

“The report is PE’s report,” Jones told The Georgetowner on April 7. “All comments, propositions, letters from community organizations and individuals are all being posted openly on the DPR website.”

— promised, promised, promised that the agency would answer all the questions in writing by April 19.

One couldn’t help wondering, a few days later, if the damper on community input and agency accountability had come from the top. On April 9, Mayor Muriel Bowser abruptly announced that she was canceling the traditional weekly conference calls with District Council members — for good. She will instead set up sporadic, as yet unscheduled, breakfast meetings with them to exchange views.

BY PEGGY SANDS