Capitol Building Dc Quotes

At the “Capitol Crawl,” people using wheelchairs, leg braces, and canes made their way to the hundred steps in front of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Then they began to climb those stairs, leaving behind whatever gear couldn’t come with them, using their arms or whatever body parts they had available for mobility. Children as young as ten participated in what became a very public, strategic spectacle. That protest is considered by historians to have been the tipping point; the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, guaranteeing curb cut changes at every city sidewalk corner and ramped entrances at all newly constructed buildings, among other new provisions.

IT WOULD BE ANOTHER MONTH BEFORE I NOTICED it, though. It wasn’t Betsy, exactly. It was the whole town. But it affected Betsy and my relationship. People in DC, for reasons I couldn’t figure out, were harder to get to know. I first noticed it when I made a joke and the group I was talking to looked at each other to see if it was okay to laugh. One of them kind of chuckled and changed the subject as though to help me save face, even though I didn’t want to save face, or need to, for that matter. The whole thing reminded me of having grown up in a legalistic religious environment. It was more than just jokes. It was as though people only wanted to eat at restaurants that had been approved of, listen to music other people thought was popular, or understandably, express a political opinion that appealed to a broad demographic. And there was almost no self-expression. There was no art in the subways, no poetry sprawled on buses, no local art more risky than paintings of flowers. And everybody’s wardrobe seemed to have been stolen from the Reagan White House. I’d done a little work in DC a few years before, so I had a friend in town. Over lunch I asked why people in DC were timid to express themselves. My friend had worked in the White House and answered my question by tilting his head toward the window. I turned and saw the Capitol dome towering high across the lawn. “Think about it, Don,” he said. “Every day fifty thousand people climb out of these buildings and crawl into your neighborhood. And every one of them works for somebody who is never allowed to express themselves. This is a town in which you get ahead by staying on script. You become whoever it is people want you to be or you’re out of a job.” Suddenly DC made sense.

Records show that slaves who lived in the Washington, D.C., area made up a good portion of the labor pool that worked on the Capitol. More than four hundred slaves, or more than half of the documented workforce that constructed the Capitol, cleared trees from Jenkins Hill and dug up stumps for the wide avenues that radiate out into the city, according to research first publicized by NBC reporter Edward Hotaling in 2000. We now know that slaves baked the bricks used for the building’s foundation and walls, sawed lumber for the interior walls and floors, dug the trenches for the foundation, worked the Virginia quarries where the sandstone was cut, and laid the stones that hold up the Capitol to this day.

Today’s National Mall is a lush green oasis of museums, monuments, and buildings running through the center of the most powerful city in the world—a place where Americans feel welcome to celebrate and pay homage to their country’s history and future. But the Mall hasn’t always been so welcoming, especially to African Americans. In fact, it was the last place any black person wanted to be; before the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, the National Mall claimed some of the most infamous slave markets of Washington, D.C.

In order to understand how everything went to hell on January 6th, you have to understand that the District of Columbia has its own rules. The city was established as a federal district in 1790. In the years since then, Washington has gained a greater degree of autonomy and home rule, but it doesn’t operate like a normal state or city. A congressional committee reviews laws passed in the city and retains authority over its budget, and of course there’s still the thorny issue of taxation without representation in Congress. Local DC Metropolitan police officers often have to take a backseat to specialized federal police forces in the city’s many national parks and federal buildings, including the Capitol. There, the primary law enforcement agency is the US Capitol Police. According to a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) directive issued in 2003, the department’s policy is to “extend assistance” to the Capitol police if it is required.

Dear Diary, THERE WAS STILL ANOTHER DAY of the conference, so we stayed in DC. While Dad attended panels and lectures, George, Bess, and I finally took in the sights. It was hard to keep up with George at the National Air and Space Museum. She raced from one exhibit to the next. Bess led us more calmly through the National Portrait Gallery, giving us time to appreciate the paintings. When it was my turn, I picked visiting the Supreme Court. With all our talk about justice the night before, I wanted to see the highest court in the land—the place where nine people get to decide exactly what the law means. Walking up the marble steps gave me goose bumps. I’d heard the building referred to as the Temple of Justice before, and now I understand why. But then I remembered Walker was still behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, and the goose bumps faded.

This layout—a domed temple facing an obelisk—is an ancient, alchemical blueprint that holds significant esoteric meaning. For those who may not know, the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, is historically based on a pagan Masonic temple theme.

Some people stay away from the chimp enclosure at a zoo to avoid seeing animals throwing feces at each other. Some people stay away from the Capitol Building in Washington, DC . . . and for the same reason.

9:12 P.M.—GROUND ZERO, WASHINGTON, D.C. Without warning, the capital of the United States was obliterated. At precisely 9:12 p.m. Eastern, in a millisecond of time, in a blinding flash of light, the White House simply ceased to exist, as did everything and everyone else for miles in every direction. No sooner had the first missile detonated in Lafayette Park than temperatures soared into the millions of degrees. The firestorm and blast wave that followed consumed everything in its path. Gone was the Treasury building, and with it the headquarters of the United States Secret Service. Gone was the FBI building, and the National Archives, and the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Capitol and all of its surrounding buildings. Wiped away was every monument, every museum, every restaurant, every hotel, every hospital, every library and landmark of any kind, every sign of civilization.

Every building was just gone, and every soul as well. Across the Potomac River, the Pentagon shuddered violently from the blast wave and then began to partially collapse. What remained standing was utterly ablaze, as was every structure not flattened for as far as the eye could see. Howling, scorching winds soon began sweeping lethal radioactivity through the city’s northeast quadrant and into Maryland, surging through Prince George’s County and Anne Arundel County, as if they were following 295 to the north and Routes 50 and 214 to the east, through Capitol Heights and Lanham and Bowie toward Crofton and Annapolis. Soon more than five thousand square miles of Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia were contaminated with deadly levels of radioactivity. And the nightmare had only just begun. Moments after the first missile hit D.C., a second missile struck the CIA building at Langley directly, its superheated fireball and cataclysmic blast wave obliterating the nation’s premier intelligence headquarters in the tree-lined suburbs of northern Virginia and vaporizing every home and office building, every church and mall for mile after mile