25 Events That Changed DC

We are in the season of list-making, and this weekend's Washington Post Magazine is no exception.  It has a feature on what it considers to be the 25 events that changed Washington, D.C. 

Here are a few that I remember well from our years of living in DC. 

16. (2000) In the ultimate partisan face-off in Washington history, the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down not to who should win the presidency, but who did, bringing postmodernist deconstructionist battles from academia’s ivory tower into the homes of American voters. Whose facts would count? In the closest presidential election in a century, the power to decide devolved first from the nation’s voters to a few hundred semi-confused elderly voters in Florida and then to the nine justices of the Supreme Court....


I remember well walking from my office in the Rayburn Building over to see the masses protesting over at the Supreme Court.  Darren has photos as well from those weeks.


17. (2001) Everyone walked through his or her own Ground Zero. We flew flags over highway overpasses. We learned alternative routes out of town. We made escape plans with those we loved. We woke in the small of the night to the vague howl of fighter jets that patrolled the skies over our homes. We joked about duct tape, then bought some more. We sent our armed forces overseas to gain revenge, then, when we looked up a decade later, they were still there and we were still here, wondering why we have to take off our belts and shoes before boarding an airplane. Every day since, in office lobbies, we have signed log books no one will ever look at. Every day since, we have shown ID cards to guards who don’t read them. Every day since, we wait for the next one and wonder who has won. 

I'm guessing that this list was put in chronological order, because I think 9/11 had the most profound impact on day-to-day life in the District.

18. (2002) What sense of security the 9/11 terrorists didn’t steal from us, the snipers did. Whereas the jihadist attacks succeeded in creating a terror that first united and later divided us, the personal vulnerability many Washingtonians felt in the days after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center was eventually displaced by debates over foreign policy and two wars. But the two snipers who shot at random people from the trunk of a 1990 Chevy Caprice aimed directly at us, targets chosen solely because we lived here. They killed 10 people. Their 23-day reign of terror focused on our most ordinary activities: pumping gas, going to school, getting a bite to eat. There was no white box truck, but suddenly white box trucks were everywhere, each of them a threat. A decade later, those who were children during those days remember it as the time they learned that their parents could be more afraid than they were.

The time of the sniper attacks was scary.  Plain and simple.  I remember Darren was out of town on a work trip those days.  The gas station I usually used was right off a major highway...I had shopped at a Home Depot the day before the sniper shot at people near that store.  Just scary.

20. (2005) After a 33-year absence so devastating that some Washingtonians lost their sense of place and aligned themselves with a team in Baltimore, baseball overcame its twice-burned bias against the nation’s capital and gave Washington a third chance. 

They weren't (and never will be) the Cardinals, but at least DC had baseball.  Nationals Park is a fun place to watch a game, and the surrounding neighborhood, once full of filth and filth, is starting to take on a cool new life.

It's a pretty good list, but I'm not sure that I would put the Occupy Movement on here yet...The WaPost has it at 25.