Barack Obama

Winter, Unplugged In Our Nation’s Capital

While visiting the National Archives over the holiday, Maury, Nate and I were hit with a technophobic realization — and it wasn’t the result of having born first-hand witness to the original copies of the Magna Carta and women’s suffrage amendment. Rather, we all stepped back in disbelief, when standing in line to view my most hallowed document, to watch a 10-year-old girl snap a BlackBerry photo of the constitution.

As a new media robot who’s slowly starting to re-embrace real life, I found the incident to be somewhat crass, if still patriotic. Naturally, a subsequent conversation about the merits of the themes in “Back to the Future,” “Minority Report” and any flick starring Will Smith ensued with some of our other friends at the New Year’s Eve dinner party I hosted the next evening. As was often the case in 2009, my pals expressed a deep concern about our generation’s instantaneous culture and artificial intelligence (in every sense the term implies).

Since we are moving obscenely fast in our everyday lives, it was lovely to have the opportunity over the last 10 days to be a tourist in my new city who had also recently lost her camera and had (mostly) taken a hiatus from Twitter. Instead of documenting every moment, I lived it and processed it. The experience reminded me often of my first trip to the nation’s capital in 1998, as a student in the Presidential Classroom program.

When I was younger DC invoked a vigorous response in me, that lives now only in old journals and a 12-year-old photo of my PC classmates that my mother found in my moving boxes last month. Though I had no Facebook statuses then to characterize my experience, I can remember standing breathless before the steps of the Supreme Court, a body that would disgust me three years later when judges from both parties reversed decades worth of states vs. federal rights decisions for political purposes in Bush v. Gore. I remember crying at the Sewall Belmont house over the sacrifices of women for equality. I remember visiting the Capitol the night of Bill Clinton’s State of the Union address, having walked past the Watergate where Monica Lewinsky was holed up the day before. (Imagine how disastrous social media would have been in those days? #TigerWoods)

I’ve been here on numerous occasions since then on business, but haven’t really allowed the weight of the city’s history and its symbolic significance to sink in as I did these past two weeks. I worked tirelessly to elect Barack Obama, yet standing with my parents and Nate at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at sunset and reading The Gettysburg Address etched in stone was not only majestic; It overwhelmed me with the reminder that America is not operating in a “post-racial” era now, despite our progress. This thought was cemented at Arlington a few days later, while Nate and I read the map of Robert E. Lee’s house, which listed the “Slave Quarters/Book Store” as a stopping point of interest, as though it were Thunder Mountain at Disneyland. Likewise, I may have poured over news about Teddy Kennedy’s death, which upset Megan and I a great deal this fall, but that didn’t at all prepare me to stand in front of his understated grave beside his fallen brothers, where Nate and I could still make out the rectangle of freshly dug grass that had been unearthed to bury a force of nature.

Was I supposed to post these thoughts and emotions as they came to me? Something in me just couldn’t bare to Twitpic the Lion of the Senate at rest. It was the same feeling we had watching that 5th-grader-turned-citizen-journalist at the Constitution, which was only magnified throughout the Archives as we watched our nation’s records evolve over the centuries. From early TV footage of Roosevelt, to Fidel Castro’s childhood letter to the White House requesting a $10 bill he’d never seen from the President, to an exhibit of 80s computer wiring the length or the wall that Maury aptly pointed out had less power than the iPhone in his pocket.

The holiday, for me, was an important contextual experience as I begin a new decade in this city. My mission has always been to tell the story of my peers as we come to fruition, and while I’ve made it a point in my career to be cutting edge, I am starting to feel that a responsible oracle – whether she etches hieroglyphics or codes a gnarly Facebook app – can never err too far on the side of human frailty.

I’ve come a long way, through the elites of Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York to the power center of the country, to try to capture the citizenship, possibility and progress we have at our feet as Americans in a way that’s grounded in reality. I’ve wondered many times if it’s better to be an insider who breaks stories at fancy parties by cozying up to even further entrenched insiders, or on the ground in places like Iowa and Ohio where I’ve worked directly with the people whose lives are effected by the elections those elite prey on with cyclical precision. Industries exist around this, gregarious inspiring and nefarious leaders enable it, zealous citizens of every party organize around it, modern day Thomas Paines blog it, disenfranchised people live it.

Some days, during the grind, it becomes dangerously close to sport. It’s reality, and history breathes around us, with us. When I look back on 2010 as it ends, I hope I can say I carried with me throughout the year the sense of obligation I feel right now to use the true value of networks and innovation to connect us back to what really matters.

At some point a monument becomes an edifice next to Starbucks, but the idea it represents is ubiquitous.

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