The Capital IS NOT The Country

Wednesday, November 19, 2025

I am just returned from a short trip to Northern Virginia.  My travels did not require me to enter Washington, D.C. proper, but I did fly in and out of Reagan National Airport.  For the uninitiated, that airport is just across the rive from D.C. and from its windows you can see the Washington Monument, in some parts the Jefferson Memorial, and if you squint hard, The Capital Dome.  It is this last sight that I want to address in this post.

We all have defining events in our lives. Some are great (your wedding day) some are not (the day of the accident that cost you a thumb) but they are hinge points on which your life swings.  They are unique for each of us and one of the many problems with them is while they are so personally pivotal, they actually mean very little to anyone else.  Your life changed, completely, but theirs did not.  You want to talk about it a lot, but they have a lot of other stuff they want to talk about.

Which brings me back to the Capital Dome.  From the vantage point of the DCA tarmac its just another building topper, sitting there between a couple of the Smithsonian buildings.  If you did not know what it was, it would be unique but otherwise just one of many, not all that special.  From that perspective, it looks like someone else’s defining moment.

Which brings me to J6.  We’ve been hearing about it for years, often described as an “insurrection.”  Now, I can see how, if you were in the building and saw a few hundred people streaming in doing vandalism and threatening vi0lence it would be a “defining moment” for you.  That would indeed be frightening and life changing.  But that does not mean it was a defining moment for the nation; that it was an insurrection.

For those of us not in the building, that is your defining moment, not ours.  And, in the end, as I witnessed from the DCA tarmac there is nothing all that special about the building.  As Lincoln said at Gettysburg, ours is a nation “of the people, by the people, for the people.”  The nation is out here, not in that building.  We are the nation, not them.  In point of fact the building could fall, completely, and the nation would continue.  Tom Clancy illustrated that in Debt of Honor.

It is time, well past time actually, for those that were in the building that day, to learn the rest of us are just not all that worked up about it.  With all due sympathy regarding the trauma, emotional or physical, that you experienced it is your trauma, not the nation’s

Or are you that vain?