Wandering in Washington

Hello, and welcome to Washington, D.C., the Capital of the United States, and the epitome of what was missing in my life at school this year. Of course, I was at school in Europe, and since everyone I was with was Canadian, the number of Jews was even more embarrassing than the number of Americans I was with. In Washington, everyone I associate with is Jewish, I'm on a Jewish program, with 100% Jews, working at a Jewish lobbyist organization, and living in this fancy-pants capital of the U. S. of A., Land of the Free and Home of the Brave...

Well. I'm living here for the summer, at least. Then I'm moving to Kingston, Ontario, CANADA to go to school.
I have taken to calling Kingston the Frozen Tundra . I don't like the cold. Still, I can't wait.

So I have moved for the time being into a dorm on the GW campus, in order to spend time in Washington. GW, I would like to clarify, is the most expensive university in the country, probably in the world, at a cost of more than sixty thousand dollars a year. This dorm sucks.

D.C. is fine, though. I don't know how much I'd like living here for longer than a summer, but maybe. Its a little (a lot) boring after London, and surprisingly chill, especially when you consider who most of the people around you are, and what they do. I'm not a big fan of the Metro here--its simply pathetic after the London Underground (isn't everything?) and of course, my roommates and I can't get our acts together enough to cook food, so I've been eating a combination of cheap restaurant food (I'm very poor) and frozen Lean Cuisine-style dinners. And chips, popcorn, brownies, etc. It is very bad, and makes me have a great deal less respect for Anorexics. Perhaps it isn't the huge amount of self-control that we all thought it was, perhaps they just can't figure out how to cook themselves anything decent. On the other hand, my roommates continue to fight over who has eaten more each day, and who is fatter, so I find myself, again, being driven to the genius of an eating disorder. I just don't care to be involved with the conversation.
(DISCLAIMER: I do not have an eating disorder. I do not expect to have an eating disorder in the near future. I eat fine. Please do not worry about my eating habits. I just talk/complain a lot.)

Anyway, as I continue to explore and as I am exposed to more and more Americana and U.S. Government paraphernalia, I am finding myself less and less impressed with my country. Today I went to a press conference about the newly-passed-by-the-House Americans with Disabilities Act. First reaction: Its 2008. Have we seriously JUST passed an Americans with Disabilities Act? It has to do with eliminating discrimination in the workplace. There was a disabled Rep. there, who had the coolest wheelchair ever. He was the same height as someone standing up while sitting in it. And it was on only two wheels. V. cool. Anyway, several Congressmen spoke, and one epileptic woman, who was very eloquent and thanked everyone for the help she would be receiving from this bill. All of which is fine, except that the whole thing was made to be a stage production. I was standing with the people who will be most affected by this bill, and the people who worked the hardest to pass it through the house (which I didn't do, of course, because I have been in the city for a week and in the country for a little more than a month, and have really no idea what is going on in American politics) but these people who really cared about the legislation, and who should have been celebrating a victory at this press conference were made to stand behind those who were speaking so that we couldn't hear anything, but we looked good for the cameras. It is beginning to seem to me that the American government is just for show.

I went yesterday to a Senate hearing on the issues taking place in Darfur. By now everyone (or everyone who might possibly care) knows about Darfur, and considers it a major problem. I can understand people (mean people, but people) in the American government not considering it a priority, per se, but they know whats going on, at least. Anyway, there was really only one senator at this hearing. I guess most of them just don't care that much about it. I am proud, however, to say that the one senator there was my very own Senior Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin. He is great.

So I guess that somewhere between my education about foreign governments, whether they are European, Israeli or Canadian, and my ever increasing knowledge about my own, American government, and in part because of the amount of show and the lack of desire to actually instigate any king of real change (especially for people who don't vote in U.S. elections, especially people who live in Africa and look, you know, like Africans)... Anyway, somewhere I guess I have lost a lot of the respect I once had for my government.

They have five weeks to win it back.
Thank God I'm moving to Canada.