Day 5: The Right to Petition

And thus we begin the delicate dance of coddling but not cajoling our most temperamental factions. The squeakiest wheel is so because it is in need, it is vulnerable, and we’ve seen this play out in destruction, in a sustained stream of social media clips that have made their way to traditional media over the course of nearly a year now.

The residual battlecries of “1776” — from a recently elected United States Representative, no less — are faint in comparison, but no less haunting. Polls show that this American tradition of violence is overwhelmingly not welcome, a surviving stance of the Arawak tribe whom Christopher Columbus first encountered, the stateside nations who inspired the Founding Fathers of America and the men themselves, who recorded a country’s commitment to non-utopic idealism.

Nobody really wants a war.

One of the first rules of play in the U.S. is instead a right to petition, to declare and talk through our differences. Even women may have a say here, since 1920. Even an Indigenous woman may serve in the Cabinet, since 2020.

President Biden’s first calendar week ended with the signing of some 19 Executive Orders to reinforce such hope, and with Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) filing a bill to award the Congressional Medal of Honor to Eugene Goodman, the Capitol Police officer who bravely ushered an incoherent, bloodthirsty mob away from the Members and Staff who were in Chambers that fateful day of Biden’s official election. Goodman did so without the Federal support that D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser requested.

And he did so despite the billions of tax dollars D.C. residents like him contribute each year to a government that doesn’t allow him the vote he protected.

The verbal and fiscal battle for D.C.’s voting rights began with the formation of the District in 1790. Statehood has endured as the Constitutionally allowable preference, for decades.