Chris and I just recently got back from a weekend trip to Washington, D.C. We went in order to attend the wedding ceremony of our dear friend Scott McGraw to the beautiful Caroline Fischer, which was the sweetest ceremony I have ever attended (including my own). But since the wedding took only a few hours of the collective trip, we had plenty of time to sight see.

We like to consider ourselves cityfolk, and because we live in a forgotten corner of the Alabama landscape, we usually head off to some place with tall buildings, public transportation, and indian food. I wouldn’t say that we are big city connoisseurs, but we have been to quite a few, and have seen the pros and cons of many different ones. For some reason, DC struck me differently than any other city we have been to yet.

I had been a few times before, for school trips and theatre trips and what have you. I’ve been pooped on by a terrorist pigeon while standing in line to see the Capitol, I have seen the Constitution, the Monuments, the museums, and all of the holy land highlights that a good  pilgrim should pay homage to while at Amerimecca. So this time we just walked around the city and tried to look cooler than the billion or so angry tea party tax paying people who were protesting on the Mall.

I want to say we succeeded.

And while in the middle of succeeding at looking cooler than a busload of patriotic senior citizens from Kansas, I noticed how truly beautiful the city of Washington, D.C. is. Granted, we were tourists, and stayed in the nicer bits of town. I am sure someone could point out to me an ugly part or two if they tried. But because there is a law that no building can be taller than the Washington Monument, the town has seemed to retain more of its charm that so much of America seems to lack.

Am I the only one who thinks it is strange that the capital city of the very nation that founded the “bigger is better” mentality has perched itself like a delicate diamond necklace on the breastbone of America? The architectural emphasis is on quality, not quantity. You can tell that on all of the buildings, from the monuments and museums to the back alley row houses, someone thought about each detail. Human handprints cover those structures from the front steps to the weathervanes. They were all different. They were all special. They all had a story to tell.

Now I usually don’t get so emotionally connected to architecture. In fact, I would probably roll my eyes at someone who talked like I just did about a building. That kind of speech is best left for people who read Ayn Rand novels and eat quiche. But I have to say that I do get actually frustrated with the way we Americans like to live these days. I say “we” because I consider myself a struggler in these areas as well. We have become such consumers, in everything we do, that very few of us actually get the pleasure of digesting the things we consume. We like our lives to be fast and cheap. Who wants to wait for an expensive meal, or go to all the trouble of cooking one yourself, when you can eat at McDonald’s right now for under $5? Who wants to deal with taking time to make healthy lifestyle choices, when you can smoke cigarettes for 20 years and then wait until you get lung cancer and have the doctor fix that in 8 chemo sessions? Who wants to hire someone to design the perfect eco-friendly house for you when there is a neighborhood of foreclosed McMansions just down the street for cheap? Why take the time to actually have a conversation with someone when we can ask the standard “how are you?’ questions and make them feel like we actually care, when we can’t even remember their names or how we know them? Who wants to have someone build a church building with purpose and meaning, when we can order a metal warehouse off the internet and put $10000 of AV equipment in it to make people think we are relevant?

Who does? Well, Americans do. Not all of us. But enough of us.

Enough of us have decided that in the name of efficiency, food is better from a plastic package. Enough of us have decided that in the name of cost, the bigger you can get something, the better it is. Enough of us have decided that in the name of convenience, human interaction can be dumbed down into a list of predetermined questions with predetermined answers. Even words have suffered due to convenience. LOL. G2G. I B W8ING 4 U.

But thank you, Jesus, for our capital city. Thank you that our forefathers believed in beauty enough to spend time on it, to spend money on it, to  think it up, defend it, and work together to make it what it is. Please don’t let us screw it up with our jaded idea of progress.

I leave you with some pictures of what I mean. I didn’t take these.