Where is the pride?

24 Jul

This past weekend Bill and I were lucky enough to sneak away for some quiet time without the boys. Man did I need that!

We headed to one of my favorite places, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Chased south by bad weather, we decided to spend a day seeing the sights of Washington DC. If you happen to follow my twitter feed you know that we were all over the place.

My Life In Mommyland

The White House looking less than immaculate.

Something struck me as I entered the mall, you know, by the Smithsonian museums. I remember it being much cleaner.

The last time I was in DC was probably the late 90’s and I remember the mall as being pristinely manicured grass and nice gravel pathways. Now, everything is muddled. There is no clean line where the grass ends and the pathways begin and it looks…dirty.

We made our way to other sights around town and when we hit the Capital Building I was shocked.

My Life In Mommyland

As Americans, we were minorities in town. People from all over the world were walking around taking in the sights.

Shouldn’t we have our best foot forward?

The lawn at the capital building was disgraceful. Full of weeds and looking quite shabby. The beds around the building were in the same state of disarray. No definition where the lawn ended and the gardens began. Weeds growing and over growing everything. Over all it gave the appearance more of an abandoned house than one of the most recognizable buildings in our great country.

I know there are pressing issues in the world right now and some of you might think that the appearance of our nation’s capital is not important enough to even rank. I would have to disagree with those people. What visitors see when they come to visit us has an effect on how they see us as a nation. Don’t we have a bad enough reputation in some parts of the world? Do we really want to look like unkempt slobs to the world as well?

I didn’t take any photos of the dirty parts because I was actually embarrassed.

We’re struggling with record high unemployment rates. I can see a way to help the DC metro area with that…Hire people to take care of the grounds.

To me it all comes back to pride in ownership. This isĀ our country, lets show some pride and put our best foot forward even if it’s in the garden. I’m sure there are grounds crews that take care of all that, they should be ashamed.

I don’t know, maybe I’m off base here but I can tell you that as I stood amongst the people from foreign lands I was embarrassed to see what I saw.

What do you think? Should it matter what our national landmarks look like or are there more pressing issues?

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