I think often of Yarn Harlot (who I know has a name - Stephanie Pearl-McPhee) saying that she had no trouble imagining knitters as great fundraisers, because knitters and other yarn peeps engage in a craft where you intentionally set out to make something piece by piece, stitch by stitch, so the idea of small donations adding up to something huge is not much of a mental adjustment. Similarly activist Miriame Kaba often says, "Hope is a discipline."
So on Friday I tuned into C-Span to watch the historic passage of HR51 through the House of Representatives. It would shrink the official federal enclave to basically be some grass and some federal buildings, and make the rest of what is collectively referred to as DC a state.
Oh, and if you are here to tell me that this is against the Constitution - a - it's not, and b, I don't care. The Constitution doesn't say citizens in DC shouldn't have rights, but it also was written with the assumption that a lot of people, including people who looked and were shaped like me, wouldn't need rights.
It is possible that this bill will also pass the Senate and for the first time since DC was organized in 1801, the citizens within it would have rights. (Note: Of course, when they shrunk DC in 1846, so a slave port in Alexandria could remain active while they banned slave trade in DC (but only DC in 1850) those citizens got rights back. Weird. No one minded then. Oh wait, just some citizens. That's probably why.)
Or it may not pass the Senate. We shall see. But this remains a historic step towards where we ought to be. So I will celebrate it.
