Dear THIH community,
One of the things that is important to us, aside from neighborhood gossip, is setting the record straight. And we’ve realized that we made a mistake with the Recall Charles Allen folks. We should have supported them and upheld them because all they wanted was to publicly punish and censor a Councilmember who did not align with their public safety vision.
And what was this public safety vision? It was a narrow-minded revision of a perfectly serviceable criminal code from 1901. Do criminals really need breaks? They are criminals through and through. Despite our system proclaiming that everyone is innocent until declared guilty, we all know in our hearts and minds that due process is one of those pesky, bureaucratic inconveniences that is in place more as a safeguard to avoid lawsuits, rather than a basic protection for all citizens’ rights. So what if this revision was thoughtful and was carefully drafted with more than five years’ worth of meetings by a commission expressly created to take the community’s needs into account? Has anyone not heard the expression, “Too many cooks in the kitchen?” At the end of the day, we only need the Mayor’s opinion and input, and if she thought it was a good idea to veto a bill that passed nearly unanimously and then seek the input of the current Republican party– which definitely has DC’s best interest at heart and isn’t holding $1 billion of our budget in some sort of limbo– then she knows best. That’s why all the signage in every single event around the District reads in largest font “MAYOR MURIEL BOWSER PRESENTS.” It’s all her, and we shouldn’t doubt her.
Back to recalling Allen: I mean, really. Who wants an annoyingly upstanding citizen who’s refused corporate donations in all of his campaigns? Who wants to be represented by a person who chooses to send his children to DC Public Schools and have them play Little League alongside our kids, and whose staff is not just deeply embedded in the community but also responsive and kind? Staff members who are committed to the neighborhood, some of which have even written for THIH in the past– who would ever want that?
So on this day of our Lord, April 1, 2025, I would like to formally apologize to all the neighbors who wanted to move DC away from kindness, compassion and second chances. You were right: We should have fought more for the values of our current administration. All this empathy is killing us from the inside.