A Close Up Look at Washington D.C.

By Taylor Jones

            Skipping school, meeting kids from all over the country, and visiting Washington D.C. for a week, who wouldn’t want to go on the Close Up trip? But that’s just the half of it. This year the Close Up program provided over two hundred high school students from several states and Puerto Rico with the opportunity to enjoy a hands-on experience of how the United States federal government operates.  We all learned (or in some cases forgot) the names, dates, and legislation taught in the classroom, but a textbook really cannot convey the same sense of tangibility as actually visiting our nation’s capital. Information about Abraham Lincoln can be acquired in school, but ceases to be applied until you really climb the steps of the Lincoln Monument, reach the top, and after a deep breath release a much-deserved “wow.” And that’s not all; we toured the city and received an education that would never be replaced. 

            The seven of us from Pacific Grove High School were grateful for our venture to Washington D.C. and experienced a wealth of opportunities. Among these outings were visits to the presidential monuments, war memorials, the Capitol building, the Library of Congress, Ford’s Theatre, and the Smithsonian Museum. One of my favorite stops was an overnight trip to colonial Williamsburg, where the buildings and atmosphere of the 1700s has been preserved. Here we went inside America’s first governmental body, the House of Burgesses, and developed a greater understanding of how our country began. I thoroughly enjoyed Williamsburg because everyone there is dressed up like a colonist, acts like a colonist, and really makes you feel like you stepped in a time machine and dialed in 1770. By walking down the main drag, you can go inside the authentic stores and learn how the silversmith made their craft, how the printing press operated before industrial machinery, and even taste a sample of spiced hot chocolate or tea in the local tavern. Overall, Williamsburg provided for an educational contrast between the past and present governments of America. 

As warm sunlight glazed the brand new Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Washington D.C., I studied his message that “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Appropriate for the Civil Rights movement when King made this statement in 1965, his timeless words are entirely applicable to our modern world. Take for example the United States’ seemingly endless debt, fighting for democracy in the Middle East, and an economic downturn that has left roughly ten percent of American’s without jobs in 2011. Each of these issues reflect the words of Dr. King, and as students gathered from across the country on Close Up we learned that our salient responsibility of becoming functioning adults in society is to cooperate and compromise with each other. No one will ever live in their dreamt Utopia, simply because everyone has a different view of what that ideal society should entail. Thus, we need not follow the example of the United States’ current gridlocked Congressmen, but rather set the grounds for compromise like our Founding Fathers before us.