Yesterday, I marched on Washington to call for an end to the war, along with about 10,000 other people. This makes my third trip to DC, my first trip being only a month and a half before 9/11 when I was a fifteen years old from Arkansas visiting with 4-H through Citizenship: Washington Focus. Back then, I remember going to the National History Smithsonian and thinking it was absolutely amazing, and being annoyed that the other girls in my group moved through the museum far too quickly for me because they didn’t care about history. Now that I’m older and finishing up my Master’s degree in History, my reaction to the museum was much different. I call this rection “disgust.” There’s so much left out, and so many exhibits created by a certain cable channel reputed for its bad history skills. It’s emphasis is sensationalism to get more viewers, thus, more money, instead of creating factual programs–which is
very strange to me because history is sensationalist enough all on its own because people have the tendency to be dramatic, selfish, impulsive jerks (also, cynical). Now that I’m older, the Smithsonian, to me, is like calling a fast food burger nutritious. The Smithsonian, to me, is now just like high school textbooks, full of heroification and one-sided lies. Nowhere is there the story of how George Washington became General, then President, because then he would just seem like another egotistical, greedy mortal. Instead, inside the Smithsonian and all over DC, there are various statues for Washington, many of which make him look like some Greek god. But he wasn’t a god, not at all. He was just a dude with bad teeth that showed up on purpose in his soldier uniform to make himself look important, even though he’d only had relatively minor roles in the British army as a Lt. Colonel during the French and Indian War, and surely nothing to prepare him to be a General in a war. (For an explanation of Army ranks, click here. Note the great difference between Lt. Colonel and any kind of General.) It’s like a con, really. But they can’t make him seem like you or I. Instead, they call him “noble” and erect giant phalluses to, perhaps, symbolically show the world for what he was compensating. Instead of telling a fuller, more honest story of history, they devote a huge portion of the museum to war, war, war, of course saying nothing of imperialism or deaths or the suffering of fellow human beings in 
our names. Why not? What do they fear would happen if they told the American story, both good and bad? Perhaps it is like Langston Hughes’s deferred dream. If they told a fuller story of American history, would those who viewed the exhibits and learned of this mourn, then revolt? Yesterday, I watched as Americans that don’t know their own history walked around like the Smithsonian like a shrine, like they’ve found the holy grail of what it means to be American, which is why the line for the entertainment portion–tv and actors and pop culture and stuff, where they keep Dorothy’s shoes and Archie’s chair–stretched all the way to the lobby. Because fiction is more popular than non-fiction.
It was outside the Washington Monument, however, where Cindy Sheehan had set up camp, where she and others had created a GIANT recreation of Arlington Cemetery for those who’d been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, including civilians, that I watched a fat man point and laugh and suggest to his family that they go look at the protest, to look at the fake cemetery, with all the very real dead people from two sides of the world. I think this is when my dream exploded.
Last night, I made a trip to the pharmacy to pick up the medications that, well, keep me alive. I left, instead, empty handed because I could not afford my medications. My insurance had changed its plan on me, so that it no longer paid $2,000 per semester for medications, but rather, $2,000 per year. As someone with a chronic illness, that is absolutely nothing. Had I paid for my medications last night–Advair, Singulair, and Allegra–I would’ve been less more than $400. As I walked back home, I pondered my options. I couldn’t beg my parents for money every month. They can’t afford to pay that much every month, either. I once looked into a prescription program through the state, but I wasn’t eligible because I’m not a legal resident of the state I live in now. It occurred to me on this trip home that insurance companies were the real death panels. It was they who really decided who was to live and who was to die. Because I have severe asthma and allergies requiring medications to keep my airways open, and therefore cost my insurance a lot of money each month, I was marked for death. My previous insurance did this to me once, too, after a concussion. They refused to pay for my doctor visits because it was an accident, then raised my bill, first, by $15 a month, then by $40. My mother canceled her own insurance in order to afford this. When she developed degenerative disks in her back last year, she had no insurance to cover her medications or doctor bills, so she initially refused treatment for months because she knew she couldn’t afford it. She was in too much pain to drive, dress, or bathe herself, and her emails to me began to contain hints of suicide after my father was diagnosed with cancer.
Last night in class, a classmate said, in comparing our modern lives to the Victorians, that religion doesn’t mean anything to us. Uh, say what? 
By request, I am typing up my brother’s most recent editorial, which I replied to in 
Recently a small-town newspaper editor called a Democrat who informed him that his editorials were “out there” his “fiend.” Fiend? What is this, some 1950s Cold War cartoon? Nov von to hard-eest part of fiendish plan! (Maybe this is why Sarah Palin killed Bullwinkle? He looked at her funny?)
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