In my capacity as a libertarian pundit, it is my solemn duty to abominate Washington. Its legions of persnickety bureaucrats! Its armies of pandering politicians! Its avid dreams to bring every last corner of America under the dead hand of state control!
To heck with all that. I love my nation’s capital with all my heart.
We are an ambitious city but not a demanding one, at least for residents. Our dainty proportions mean I can walk to work or to many friends’ homes. I can drive, if I’d rather, because street parking is still reasonably available — or take an electric scooter, the Metro, a bus or a bikeshare. Housing is cheap compared with New York, the city of my birth, the streets uncrowded, the grocery stores palatial, the big-box stores close. And these are just the negative virtues.
The positive ones abound, too: The National Arboretumoffers its shadowed groves, verdant meadows and delightful bonsai shrine. Our museums are excellent, and — take that, Chicago and New York! — mostly free to enter. As are the monuments to our nation’s awesome history. Our restaurants are excellent, if a little pricier than they should be, and our cocktail bars get better every day.
But the absolute best thing about D.C. is its Fourth of July fireworks, which, in proper patriotic spirit, kick off several weeks before that great date. On the night itself, you can see the public housing complexes on North Capitol Street putting on a fireworks show that almost, but not quite, rivals the professional display being staged along the Potomac, and every street corner seems to have its crowd of revelers showing off their pyrotechnic competence. It is loud, it is messy, and it is a wee bit illegal, but it is also a time-honored tradition, and the police step in only to ensure that no one sets the city on fire.
On the night I got engaged, I set off fireworks in a parking lot with friends, then walked home through a dizzy, delightful shower of sparkles. What other city could offer me that, and a $1 jumbo slice to eat while I walked? If you ask me, it could happen only in the best city in the best country in all the world.
Megan McArdle
Our great female athletes
The U.S. Women’s National Team has played phenomenal soccer this summer, and its quarterfinal against France broke a viewership record. Serena Williams became the first athlete on Forbes’ Richest Self-Made Women list. Lindsey Vonn retired this year after a glorious career as one of the best American skiers of all time. America’s female athletes are showing the world how talented they are — and the country is finally rooting for them. There is still a long way to go: achieving pay equality, ensuring adequate funding and resources for varsity programs, and ending stereotypes that prevent young girls and LGBTQ youths from following their passions. But this Fourth of July, we should take a moment to celebrate how much American women in sports have accomplished despite all the obstacles in their way.
Mili Mitra
Faith and courage
I learned growing up in the Foggy Bottom-West End section of our nation’s capital that the Fourth of July was meant to be a celebration of the nation’s birthday. The shower of sparkles at the end of wire sticks waved frantically on the sidewalk in front of our home commemorated that event. So, too, the spectacular fireworks on the Mall that three King kids watched with their father from his favorite viewing vantage point near our grandparents’ home on 23rd Street NW, a few blocks north of the Lincoln Memorial.
That celebration, we learned in school, was for the approval of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
It was a date I celebrated in uniform at a U.S. Army post, as a greeter of foreign guests at a celebration staged at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn and wherever I happened to be on the day the birth of the United States of America was celebrated.
Those celebrations were not about all that went on in America — the great, the not so good and the awful — after the revered document was approved. Recognizing America’s certificate of birth, and the faith and courage that produced it, was — up to now — sufficient unto the day.
But that changes on the Fourth of July 2019. Our national birthday party is being crashed.
This July 4 will be the day a narcissistic president celebrates himself and his altered vision of what is worthy of an Independence Day celebration. This year, the Declaration’s inheritors will mourn.
Colbert I. King
