Day 6

AU Park (June 22, 2019)

Spending another day wandering the quiet streets of AU Park, we came across the following street mural. For those of you not from around here, you may not know that the over 700,000 residents of Washington D.C. do not have the same voting rights as other Americans. Although we can vote for the President we don’t have voting Senators or Representatives. Hence, the license plates of many of our cars include the true statement “Taxation without Representation”. There is a DC statehood movement that has gathered some momentum. But it appears to us that it is unlikely to ever succeed. Washington D.C. residents overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Consequently, the Republicans that would need to get on board with granting the District the full voting rights of other states are unlikely to ever do so.

Throughout Washington D.C. and Ward 3 there are a number of community gardens, with plots available for free to residents who help maintain the entire area of the garden. A gardener we spoke with in Friendship Gardens said that he had recently obtained his plot after being on a waiting list for a number of years. If you are interested in obtaining a plot near you, we suggest you visit the District’s Department of Parks and Recreation website for more information at http://dpr.dc.gov