My recent trip to DC included riding the MARC train between Baltimore and DC’s Union Station twice a day, because no way was I going to sit in that traffic every day for the opportunity to pay a small fortune in parking fees.
I haven’t ridden trains much in the US simply because I’ve mostly lived where there wasn’t any service or sufficient service to be useful. Most of my experience as a rail passenger has been in Europe.
I’m no good at doing anything productive while in motion, so while my fellow commuters worked on their computers or had long, loud phone conversations, I stared out the window at the world going by at a comfortable pace for observation. In the US, the world faces the road and faces away from the rails, so on a train you get to see the hidden backside of things.
A warehouse, abandoned and boarded up, festooned with graffiti, beginning to fall apart.
A pretty little waterway with a duck cleaving the still water, the banks lined with plastic bottles.
A suburban backyard filled with a rotting shed, a rusting car, and a broken trampoline.
Rowhouses with boarded windows and collapsing roofs.
The business with the tidy facade and a back parking lot full of broken equipment, rotting pallets, and rusting vehicles.
And the railway itself, lined with toppled fences, abandoned equipment, disused and crumbling buildings, and trash everywhere. Trash between the rails and tracks. Trash on the embankments. Trash piled under the bridges. Trash wedged up against the platforms.
I remembered riding a train across Germany, watching the little farms and villages flash by as I traveled from the Netherlands to Augsburg. Mentally comparing that landscape to the scene outside my MARC train window fills me with sorrow.
Sure, there’s poverty and decay in my rural community. Lots of it. But seeing it in a new place brings fresh awareness and pain. We could have what Germany has - a clean, fast, efficient rail system. But more than that, we could have the flourishing farms and pleasant neighborhoods that their trains go past. We could have well-maintained, modern infrastructure. We could at least not have trash piled up beside the rails.
When the train pulls into Union Station, the scene changes suddenly and dramatically to marble grandiosity and echoing vaulted ceilings. There, in the heart of America’s power and wealth, is a coffee shop, staffed with two young black women. Around the corner is a shoe-shine stand, staffed by an older black man. There, on the steps of the fountain (shut off for the season) in front of the station are two unhoused people sitting on mats made of repurposed plastic shopping bags. They appear to be of the southeast Asian diaspora.
Racism is the ugly heart of the US, and like the rotten heart of the hackberry tree in my backyard, it’s coming apart. Over the past four years I’ve watched that tree slowly dying, the split in the trunk extending, year after year, all the way to the ground. I knew it needed to be felled, but there was no way to do it safely without equipment we don’t have. This winter we had an ice storm, and I held my breath. I was sitting in the back room tending the fire in the wood stove when I heard the unmistakable pop/crack/swish/thud as the largest third of the tree broke away and crushed my back fence. I looked out the window. The two remaining thirds slowly spread apart from each other. I did some mental math and decided I was safe to stay at the window. Over the next hour the split grew slowly wider, and then the remainder crashed to the ground. Now nothing remains but shattered branches and twisted, shredded trunk.
Many people have studied and written about the intersection between racism, public policy, infrastructure, and trains. Search and you will find endless articles on academic websites. But I don’t think the average person thinks about it much. Like a slowly boiling frog, they just think what they see today is normal and don’t remember last week, year, decade, or century. Even if they lived through it. The way things are feels inevitable. We’ve been told “we can’t afford it” all of our lives, and we’ve internalized a paradigm of scarcity that doesn’t match reality. I don’t think of myself as old, but I’m old enough to have seen and remember a lot of change. I might not have understood it all as it unfolded, but I observed.
When did we stop building and progressing as a country, as a community? When did we stop striving for greatness and accept steady decline as our normal? It would take a lot of spreadsheets and graphs to draw the picture, but I’m placing my bets on 1964.
When I came home to Texas in 1989 from Germany after 3 years away, I saw the change. Maybe that’s what you have to do to keep from being boiled. You have to leave. None of the change was for the better. Everything had gotten worse in my neighborhood. The stores were closed. Payday loan sharks and storefront churches proliferated. Houses hadn’t been painted or repaired. Apartment complexes were run down and grafittied. There were more unhoused and unemployed people on the streets. Schools and post offices were closed and consolidated, hollowing out neighborhoods. Cheap ugly highway-facing shopping strips full of low quality chain stores replaced farmland and forest. I stood in a mall parking lot on a hot afternoon in late October a week after my discharge from the military and cried. I didn’t understand why, but I was homesick for a place that didn’t exist any more and the country I had just left that had started to feel like home but never would be.
The disease that America was built on has never been eradicated, and it’s killing us. I haven’t met a Trump voter yet who wasn’t racist. I don’t think they exist. And they’re sure that “those” people who don’t deserve the American dream are threatening them and have to be punished. They’re burning down the house. And I can’t help but wonder, when they’re sleeping in a tent, will they finally drop the matches?