My junior high school class day trip from suburban Philadelphia to Washington, DC was a very interesting and enjoyable venture for all of us. We boarded the buses very early in the morning in front of my junior high school, and rode down to Washington for a full day of seeing many of the various sites there. Time constraints dictated that we were only able to view many of the well-known attractions, including the White House, from the street. We did get to see the inside of the Washington Monument, and witnessed the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery, however.

The teacher who was chaperoning the particular bus I was on had a well-earned reputation for zero tolerance of misconduct; he himself had once been a bus driver, and insisted that we cleaned up the litter before he allowed us to leave the bus upon our return to the junior high school late that night. At least on our particular bus, the trip proceeded without any major complications.

I had previously traveled to Washington with my family on several occasions, and enjoyed each and every trip I had made before (and would make in the future).  What I noticed on that particular excursion with my junior high school class was that the Washington DC I had known before was marred by the ongoing construction of what would become the Washington Metro transit system, which would begin operations seven years later.  Streets were closed, and piles of dirt from the excavations were to be seen at many locations as tunnels were bored beneath the streets of Washington.

The people of Washington’s affluent Georgetown section used their political clout to prevent the Metro from being constructed in their area; many unabashedly making no efforts to conceal their fears of the prospects of increasing access to their neighborhood of individuals deemed by them to be of lower-class.

Fast-forward a few decades: Many........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)