#dc_ — Public Fediverse posts

D.C. has its issues, but armed soldiers from other states won’t solve them

After a week and change of wondering when a trip in or out of the D.C. would treat me to the sight of President Trump’s Aug. 11 decision to summon National Guard troops from the rest of the nation to serve as political props around the District, a Bikeshare commute for an event Tuesday provided visible proof: soldiers walking around Lafayette Square.

They were picking up trash.

Going to Union Station Friday afternoon provided a few more reminders: five soldiers, armed with pistols, standing on the upper level of Metro Center (one flashed a thumbs-up for a news photographer), and three outside Union Station, outnumbered by veterans under a tent with signs reminding current servicemembers of their duty to the Constitution.

I asked the three where they were from: Louisiana. After a bit of banter about the weather, I said I hoped they could get home to their families soon.

That’s not because I think the D.C. has crime1 solved–although it is down significantly across the city–but because soldiers are not the way to solve it. Law enforcement is not military service, those two professions have profoundly different missions and rules, and U.S. law has long prohibited using soldiers as cops for sound reasons.

The governors of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia who sent National Guard units to the District should know this, because multiple cities in their states have higher crime rates than D.C. If deploying armed National Guardsmen and women in urban areas helped stop murders, those governors would have done it already with a much smaller travel budget.

But sending a large contingent of soldiers carrying weapons into D.C. in particular does something else: advertise the president’s ability to treat my neighbors across the Potomac as subjects. While it seems clear that Trump broke the law when he sent National Guard units into Los Angeles without the permission of California’s government, the law expressly gives the president control of the D.C. National Guard, with zero input allowed to the District’s government.

Trump may think this show of force makes me nervous. If so, he’s wrong. It makes me angry. And it makes me even more convinced that the only way to end the abuse of power that Congress has also repeatedly enjoyed at the expense of the taxpaying people of D.C. is statehood for the people of D.C.

1. My most direct experience of crime in D.C. came in February of 1996, when I was mugged at gunpoint on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building just off Connecticut Avenue. I had maybe $30 in my wallet; I then made far more than that by selling a moderately overwrought essay about the experience to the Post, a journalistic business model that I cannot recommend anybody try to repeat. ↩︎

#DC_ #DCStatehood #DistrictOfColumbia #militarized #NationalGuard #statehoodNow #TrumpNationalGuard #TrumpOccupation #Washington

D.C. has its issues, but armed soldiers from other states won’t solve them

After a week and change of wondering when a trip in or out of the D.C. would treat me to the sight of President Trump’s Aug. 11 decision to summon National Guard troops from the rest of the nation to serve as political props around the District, a Bikeshare commute for an event Tuesday provided visible proof: soldiers walking around Lafayette Square.

They were picking up trash.

Going to Union Station Friday afternoon provided a few more reminders: five soldiers, armed with pistols, standing on the upper level of Metro Center (one flashed a thumbs-up for a news photographer), and three outside Union Station, outnumbered by veterans under a tent with signs reminding current servicemembers of their duty to the Constitution.

I asked the three where they were from: Louisiana. After a bit of banter about the weather, I said I hoped they could get home to their families soon.

That’s not because I think the D.C. has crime1 solved–although it is down significantly across the city–but because soldiers are not the way to solve it. Law enforcement is not military service, those two professions have profoundly different missions and rules, and U.S. law has long prohibited using soldiers as cops for sound reasons.

The governors of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia who sent National Guard units to the District should know this, because multiple cities in their states have higher crime rates than D.C. If deploying armed National Guardsmen and women in urban areas helped stop murders, those governors would have done it already with a much smaller travel budget.

But sending a large contingent of soldiers carrying weapons into D.C. in particular does something else: advertise the president’s ability to treat my neighbors across the Potomac as subjects. While it seems clear that Trump broke the law when he sent National Guard units into Los Angeles without the permission of California’s government, the law expressly gives the president control of the D.C. National Guard, with zero input allowed to the District’s government.

Trump may think this show of force makes me nervous. If so, he’s wrong. It makes me angry. And it makes me even more convinced that the only way to end the abuse of power that Congress has also repeatedly enjoyed at the expense of the taxpaying people of D.C. is statehood for the people of D.C.

1. My most direct experience of crime in D.C. came in February of 1996, when I was mugged at gunpoint on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building just off Connecticut Avenue. I had maybe $30 in my wallet; I then made far more than that by selling a moderately overwrought essay about the experience to the Post, a journalistic business model that I cannot recommend anybody try to repeat. ↩︎

#DC_ #DCStatehood #DistrictOfColumbia #militarized #NationalGuard #statehoodNow #TrumpNationalGuard #TrumpOccupation #Washington

Trump and the National Guard in DC

First State Color, 47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry (presented to the regiment by Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin, 20 September 1861; retired 11 May 1865, public domain).

Largely forgotten by mainstream historians, the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry was a Union Army unit which served for nearly the entire duration of the American Civil War. Formed by the fruit of the Great Keystone State’s small towns and cities, the regiment was born on August 5, 1861, when its founder, Tilghman H. Good, received permission from Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin to form an entirely new regiment in response to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for additional volunteers to help preserve American’s Union. It ended its service during the early months of the nation’s Reconstruction Era, officially mustering out at Charleston, South Carolina on Christmas Day in 1865, its members receiving their final discharge papers at Camp Cadwalader in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in early January of 1866.

Along the way, the 47th Pennsylvania made history, becoming an integrated regiment in 1862 and the only regiment from Pennsylvania to participate in the Union’s 1864 Red River Campaign across Louisiana. Its members also distinguished themselves in battle, repeatedly, including during Union General Philip Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign, which unfolded between August and December of 1864.

Learn more about key moment’s in this regiment’s history by reading the following posts:

• August 5, 1861—A New Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment Is Born
• September 1861: A New Pennsylvania Regiment Heads for Washington, D.C. and War
• October 1861: Drummer Boys, Disease, and Death
• December 1861: A Young Regiment’s First Christmas and New Year’s Day Away from Home
• Late Winter through Early Spring 1862 (Florida): Serving as Soldiers and Surrogates for Family
• Black History Month: An Early Encounter with the Evil of Slavery and a Celebration of Washington’s Birthday (February 1862)
• Spring and Summer of 1862: Disease, Duty and Another Departure
• Late September to Early October 1862: First Victory
• Early to Mid-October 1862: Jacksonville, a Confederate Steamer and a Regiment’s Historic Integration
• In Their Own Words: Soldiers Reflect on Life as Christmas and the New Year Approach During the U.S. Civil War (1862)
• Red River Campaign (Louisiana, March to June 1864)
• A Voyage North and a Memorable Encounter with Abraham Lincoln
• From Louisiana to Virginia (1864): The Battle of Snicker’s Gap and Service with the Army of the Shenandoah
• Sheridan’s Tide-Turning Shenandoah Valley Campaign: The September Battles (Virginia: July—September 1864)
• Sheridan’s Tide-Turning Shenandoah Valley Campaign: The Battle of Cedar Creek and Its Aftermath (Virginia: October—December 1864)
• The Lincoln Assassination: A Union Chaplain’s Angry, Heartsick Response (1865)

https://47thpennsylvaniavolunteers.com/2023/10/11/learn-more-about-the-47th-pennsylvania-volunteers/

#47thPennsylvaniaInfantry #47thPennsylvaniaVolunteers #AbrahamLincoln #AmericanCivilWar #AmericanHistory #BattleOfCedarCreek #Beaufort #CivilWar #DC_ #Florida #FortJefferson #FortTaylor #HiltonHead #Jacksonville #KeyWest #Louisiana #Pennsylvania #PennsylvaniaHistory #ShenandoahValley #SouthCarolina #UnionArmy #Virginia #Washington #Winchester

CHARLOTTE, N.C.–I’m in the middle of my first multiple-day road trip since… um… 1996. Things about motoring around the U.S. have changed just a bit for me since that trip from Los Angeles to D.C., much less the 1992 trek from Sacramento to the District that was my first cross-country drive.

The biggest differences are that I’m doing this trip solo instead of with a college friend–and that instead of having a room in a group house or apartment awaiting at the end of the trip, I am looking forward to seeing my wife and almost 11-year-old daughter again.

Then comes the fact that this road trip is for work instead of fun, or what passes for fun when you’re in your twenties. I’m spending a week as one of the test drivers for PCMag’s Fastest Mobile Networks project, taking a rental car and six specially configured test phones to locations picked in a series of cities.

This freelance gig on wheels started with a train–I boarded Amtrak Tuesday for the first time since February 2020 for a short ride to BWI to pick up this car Tuesday, after which I met the previous driver in Baltimore to get the test phones and spend the afternoon driving around Charm City. I devoted Wednesday to driving around D.C., went from home to Raleigh, N.C. Thursday; spent all of Friday on the roads of the Triangle; and had a considerably shorter day of driving Saturday to reach here. My tour of the southeast wraps up in Atlanta Tuesday, after which I fly home.

The vehicle in question, a Chevrolet Spark, isn’t much bigger than the Toyotas involved in 1992 and 1997. But it’s as new as rental cars get, versus the 1977 Corolla with a four-speed manual transmission that made it across the U.S. in 1992 or the 1986 Tercel with a crack in the windshield that did the same in 1996. And it has such modern conveniences as air conditioning, power windows and a backup camera.

And instead of driving entirely offline–taking old cars across deserts with neither GPS nor the ability to communicate must seem bizarre to my kid–I have a smartphone to navigate and keep me in touch via calls, text messages, e-mail, multiple social networks, and the Slack channel PCMag set up for this test. Plus the six test smartphones that spend each day on the passenger seat running their automated tests, as seen in the photo above taken in Raleigh Friday morning.

(I wrote a more detailed explanation of the testing process for Patreon readers Friday.)

But in one respect, the technology of road trips may have backslid a bit from the 1990s. Those old cars lacked CD players but did include tape decks, while this Chevy is like many new cars in not including any playback hardware for prerecorded music. I can plug in a flash drive or pair my phone via Bluetooth, but I have yet to get around to cobbling together a road-trip-relevant playlist on my phone or copying one to a flash drive. Instead, I have instead relied on a more traditional soundtrack source: the radio. And since I had an excellent college-rock station to keep me entertained around Raleigh, that hasn’t been so bad.

7/22/2021: Updated to fix a couple of inaccuracies I only realized when checking this post against old photo albums.

https://robpegoraro.com/2021/07/17/road-trips-now-and-way-back-then/

#Atlanta #Baltimore #carAudioHardware #Charlotte #DC_ #driving #FastestMobileNetworks #PCMag #Raleigh #roadTrip