In response to Adam Serwer's piece on how Washington, D.C., has changed over the last decade ("A City Divided"), reader Nick Sementelli writes: "As a white, young professional who has successively migrated east over my six years in the city (from Georgetown to Shaw to Bloomingdale), I'm squarely in the center of the 'gentrification' phenomenon, and I'm eminently familiar with both the tensions these changes foster and the confusion/guilt my peers and I struggle with in how to approach them.
Guy Molyneux ["Can Obama Make the Pivot?" June 2011]argues that President Barack Obama must address the deficit and do so by contrasting more sharply Democratic and Republican priorities. In Molyneux's telling, the public wants to cut the deficit and, moreover, believes that doing so would help the economy. This seems to afford the president no option but to pursue deficit reduction.
Today, the Reverend Jesse Jackson swung by the Demos and Prospect offices in Washington, D.C., after visiting the new Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. Jackson feels that the new statute on the Tidal Basin will become the new site for protests and rallies, rather than the Reflecting Pool near the Lincoln Memorial where King himself drew huge crowds.
The dedication ceremony set for Sunday, the 48th anniversary of King's "I Have a Dream" speech, is postponed because of Hurricane Irene, but as Jackson was here to remind us: "We've weathered storms before."
What's happening in Washington that needs to change?
Ten years after the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon, the United States is in bad shape, but our problems have little to do with what al-Qaeda did to us. America's troubles stem from what the country has done to itselfor rather, from what our political leaders have done with the nation's power and resources.
