By
Tuesday, the time change was starting to get to me.
7:44
a.m. This sleep cycle is whacking me out. I didn’t even feel like breakfast
this morning. I mean, I’m not used to French toast at 6:45 a.m. I’m barely
awake!
This day’s touring was much shorter than
that of Day 3.
7:55
a.m. Washington has 67 Starbucks! One for every square mile!
Our
first stop for the day: Arlington National Cemetery, and its additional
memorials. I believe this was, for me, the most sobering memorial we visited.
We then were privileged to watch the
Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This is a very
solemn, dignified ceremony. I must say
that, while I already held the soldiers in this division with high respect,
seeing them keep watch in full uniform in the 90+ degree heat raised my respect
several bars higher.
(The current guard.)
(The sergeant in charge of switching the
soldiers arrives.)
(The new guard, in the foreground.)
(He checks his gun, inside and out.)
(He checks every detail of his uniform.)
In the summer, they change every hour, and
in the winter, they change every half hour.
9:45 a.m. Changing of the Guard, Tomb of the
Unknowns, Arlington National Cemetery. Freedom…isn’t free, is it?
Our second, and last, stop for the day: the
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.
Here is where I should be ashamed of myself.
There were so many things to photograph here, that I sort of just copped out on
the camera. The only thing I wanted a picture of was the statue of Fala, Pres.
Roosevelt’s faithful Scottish Terrier.
11:14 a.m. It is so blame hot! And Dani
wasn’t kidding when she said planes fly into Ronald Reagan [Airport] every 90
seconds. They are nonstop—and the helicopters, too.
By 1:00, it was time to return to our work
for the day. First on the list: Bill Writing Workshop, otherwise known as “what
I considered the hardest workshop yet.”
This day, we actually wrote a Congressional bill.
One that looked
just like the bills our state and national senators and representatives write. ARE WE NOT IMPRESSIVE?!
Okay, maybe it
was a lot simpler than the “real” bills. Seriously, though, if I learned
anything from CWF, it’s that lawmaking is not child’s play. You have to learn
to compromise with the other people in the committee over ideas and wording. It
was like torture for me to stay seated and refrain from yelling out what I
thought was the perfect wording. Believe me, it’s hard when I’m so picky about
grammar and spelling and punctuation. You also have to learn to narrow down
what your particular problem(s) are, and then you have to figure out how to
specifically state your problems and your solutions.
This is the
basic format for a congressional bill:
“CWF Resolution
14.S
Resolved by the
House of Citizenship Washington Focus that…
Whereas…
and; Whereas…
and; Whereas…
therefore be it
Resolved that…
and be it
Further; Resolved that…
and be it
Finally; Resolved that…”
I was quite
relieved to find that all we had to do was fill in the “skeleton,” because I
had this notion that laws were written with grand, flowing language that the
common man couldn’t read. That, of course, turned out to be false. So, we came out of this workshop with a rough
draft bill. It would be refined in the Government Committee’s meeting that
followed Workshop.
1:31 p.m. NuVal?
Yes, NuVal. This is a system that gives
different food items points based on their nutritional value. The higher the
points=the more nutritional value. One of the guys in our group brought it up,
and after some deliberation, we all decided to implement it into our bill.
(And here, I will take the liberty to say
that when the NuVal system was employed at our local Price Cutter earlier this
year, I felt a small degree of superiority because I knew about NuVal 9
months earlier than Price Cutter’s customers.)
But I digress. With the knowledge that I had
just helped write a bill-that-would-become-a-fake-law, I moseyed on over to committee
meeting with my head held high. This day was when we put the pedal to the metal.
We only had this day and the day after to write and finalize the newsletter, so
I picked a layout and started writing my assigned piece, while the other girls
carried out their marching orders. Next, we had a little playtime. I didn’t
actually play very much myself. When I look back on it now, I will admit that I
might have been a bit of a spoilsport about the Derby. I’ve always been bad at
games that required running, so I kind of chickened out on most everything.
However, I was more than happy to cheer my friends on from the sidelines. After
the Derby, we got to practice discussing opposing opinions. Or what I’d term “polite
arguing.” In Town Hall, all the kids split into groups and discussed issues
relevant to our age and current worlds. I was fortunate to be in a group where
we almost all agreed on everything and if we didn’t, we shared our differences
quite nicely, I thought. I understood from others, though, that some groups
weren’t so lucky. (I’m talking things like kids endorsing teen drinking and
smoking. Could someone PLEASE explain to me where my generation missed the
point?! Never mind.)
6:00 p.m. Derby was boring. But Workshop and
Committee were great. I understand writing a bill so much better now. We got a
lot written in committee. And Town Hall isn’t as bad as I thought it it’d be.
Dinner was excellent, which was good,
because we would need our strength for our last item of business for the
day……the ACTION PLAN. Well, maybe dinner wasn’t that important, but the
action plan was the hardest brain-work I did all week. Honestly. Even more than
the bill-writing. You know what made it worse?
Two-thirds
of the kids, including yours truly, didn’t have a clue how to create an action
plan.
For
starters, I’m pretty sure my chaperones had explained an Action Plan during the
trip orientation meetings held many months prior, but I still didn’t completely
understand the purpose or the process.
Let me tell you how it worked.
All
the Missouri kids headed over to the Minnesota Room with our chaperones. There
we split up into regions; in my group, the Southwest Region, there were about
14-15 kids. Each region picked some type of community service project that
everyone would, in some way, help with. Since the tornado that ravaged Joplin
was so recent, my region decided to find a way to help with that. Choosing a
project was basically the easiest part. What was really difficult, and what
took us all 3 weary hours to accomplish was deciding exactly how, when,
and where we would do the project. Obviously, somebody had to be in charge.
That ended up being delegated to the kids closest to Joplin: Newton County and
McDonald County. (Well, and technically it would include Jasper County, but we
didn’t have anyone from there.) Eventually, we decided this: the England family
from a Newton County club had suffered a loss in the tornado and it was
affecting them financially. We would raise money for them by holding Change Wars
at the Newton and McDonald County fairs, and then we would do a bake sale. Emily
Paul took charge of the McDonald County Change War; Jesse Shilling, Victoria
and Madelaine Geibler took charge of the Newton County Change War; and I headed
up the bake sale. But that wasn’t all. This very specific idea morphed into a
bigger idea: we would start a SW MO Disaster Fund for 4-H families, and all the
counties would hold fundraisers to help “fund the fund.” It sounds really nice on paper, doesn’t it? I
was afraid we’d never decide before curfew. After the Action Plan, we had
Capitol Hill orientation, so that when we went to the Capitol the next day, we
would look, sound, and act very official. This was, of course, very important.
This
day was the day that we did the most work, I believe. Just writing it all out
makes me tired, so I imagine we all slept well that night.
I already mentioned Day Four’s lesson, but I
believe it bears repeating:
Freedom isn't free, is it?
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