No Matter How it Sometimes Seems, We're Not Drifting Toward Oblivion – or the Bahamas.

By Fred Bruning

May 4, 2025

News from Washington, D.C.

It’s still there.

Promise.

We visited a week ago. All monuments present and accounted for – glorious at night, especially – and even the somber Pentagon across the Potomac added some measure of continuity.

Streets were busy – the usual blend of tourists and slender, confident-looking young people who, if not Congressional staff members, should, quick, get in their applications – and downtown traffic rattled along in familiar intemperate fashion.

Washington grabbed the “capital” title from Philadelphia in 1800 after Philadelphia swiped it from New York, a grave injustice, but let’s admit Washington has served the country as admirably as its namesake and is, I think, a place Americans can brag about, which, no doubt, they would in any case.

We ate near the Capital One Arena, which, of course, is named for a bank, and not the resident hockey team – the Capitals – but you can’t blame that on Washington because major league franchises everywhere sell naming rights to the highest bidder as though the owners are not making enough from felonious ticket prices and pricey merch in the lobby sports shop.

The restaurant is one of many operated by José Andrés, the good-guy chef who brings food into crisis zones with his World Central Kitchen relief effort but this was not a dining choice dictated by wokeness because, commendable fellow or not, Andrés knows how to serve a decent plate, Mideastern in this case, soothing dips and puffy homemade pita.

Probably Andres has noticed that across the street from his pretty restaurant there is an encampment of homeless people who on a recent chilly night were sleeping on the sidewalk, each under a taupe-colored blanket provided by volunteers, who, according to the internet, also wash the covers, refold them and put them out for subsequent use.

The point here is that Washington remains steadfast as it has since founded in 1790 – designed by French planner Pierre Charles L'Enfant, don’t tell the anti-globalist crowd – despite so much daily commotion that Americans are entitled to wonder if their beloved capital had come unmoored, been swept away to distant Chesapeake Bay and might now be drifting toward Bimini.

I would not exactly risk the overused term “no worries” in regard to the state of the union but if you thought these seismic three months had jarred everything loose, including the District of Columbia, I am reporting otherwise.

This happened once before.

It was the 70s and the nation looked like it could splinter.

Vietnam, civil rights, campus unrest, and, in recent memory, urban upheaval and the mad, terrible slayings of JFK, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and, outside his house in Jackson, Mississippi, equal justice leader Medgar Evers.

At the time, a Newsday friend, John Cashman, was doing a fellowship at Stanford, which pleased us all back in the newsroom because Cashman, a blunt, street-savvy guy from Queens, brilliant but without a college education, was not exactly someone who you might expect to find strolling a sunlit California campus in khaki Bermudas and a powder blue Polo shirt.

“C’mon out,” Cashman said on the phone.

So I did – left my wife, Wink, on Long Island with the four little kids, and got a flight we couldn’t afford, and told myself I had to be sure the country was still there, see the other coast for myself, outrageous indulgence, credit to Wink.

Looking for reassurance, I found something close.

San Francisco, all hippity-dippity, was happily hallucinogenic. Traffic pounded over the Golden Gate Bridge. Street performers charmed the crowds. The bay was brilliant.

Cashman and I tagged along with a pal from Rolling Stone magazine to see a late cut of Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film, “The Conversation,” which warned of overbearing government. The screening was at Coppola’s house. He was out of town. His wife, gracious and friendly, served popcorn.

“Glad I did this,” I told Cashman after four days. “But got to head back. Wink has the kids.”

“Go,” he said.

I flew home encouraged but knowing tough times likely still were ahead.

That’s how it feels after visiting Washington all these years later.

Sure, these are crazy days, unstrung and confounding, just look at the news, but this is no time to short-sell hope.

What has changed can change again.

We are who we are.

If some are cold, others bring blankets.

America, America.

Previous Invisible Ink posts at: https://fredbruning.substack.com/archive