DC has scant few cultural icons of its own. Like so many graduate students and political aides, big ideas pass through, leaving little trace of their presence. I felt a great sense of betrayal in the announcement that The Awakening would be unearthed from its place near the tip of Haines Point. The Awakening is a sculpture, not a monument. It sits outside the boundaries of the classical or abstract artworks that occupy the mall’s sculpture gardens and art gallery steps. In my lifetime I ve grown from being able to fit in the palm of the masculine left hand to being able to reach the tips of his fingers that used to tower over my head. The Awakening preceded the period of political correctness when public art had to reflect some ethnic diversity. It s a place that my parents took me for Sunday afternoon picnics and a destination for bicycle rides on freak warm winter days like the one that passed through in late January. The Awakening was always high on the list of sites to take people who were still feeling their way around the city.

A real estate developer from Maryland bought the sculpture justifying himself in that nobody came out to Haines Point to see it. Blind to his intentions; on the coldest windiest winter day, in the most unforgiving summer heat and humidity, I never saw The Awakening without attendance. The Awakening will be taken across the Anacostia River to a new development project. My question is: why couldn t they just copy The Awakening? Like the hammering man or so many harbor mermaids, every new municipal development seems to have one. More importantly,what is the value of building a new development at the cost of an established one? Let it be known that the District of Columbia has an established and enfranchised population of people who identify with the city and its features such as The Awakening as part of their home. Like a body harvested of so many internal organs, a piece of a city s soul has been heisted by the soulless pillager of shiny things.

How or by whom would the action have been taken to solidify the sculpture in its place? The City? The Parks Department? The Arts Commission? An act of Congress? We lock the doors to our homes, we keep our money in banks, but nobody took responsibility for legally locking down a sculpture buried on national park land. Every year there s a new rumor of someone scheming to dig up The Awakening. This time they weren t just crying wolf.

If they left it a muddy pit as a statement to the savagery that had taken place, that would be honest enough, but now they scheme to install a freedom park , some kind of sterile municipal placeholder, a tombstone as testament to what has been lost. Has there been any effort to replace The Awakening with an artwork of near-equal merit? Perhaps we should go to Baltimore to see how an enfranchised city reacts when we try to buy and relocate their Washington monument. After all, who goes to Baltimore? What is now the magnet that draws us out to the windy extent of Haines Point?

This is defamation, a shortsighted sellout, a testament to a transient tenant city with little remaining personal identity and no sense of ownership. Senators can come in from the Midwest and play political football with our gun laws but never take a vested interest in the public school system. District residents carry the tax burden and hopped-up insurance rates while hyper aggressive suburban drivers romp around belligerently in their SUV s and complain about the lack of parking spaces. A piece of a city s heritage has been taken with a path of complacency from the mayor s office to the park service.

The message is clear; it s not my town, I just live here.

It doesn t matter to me where The Awakening is going, what kind of fence they put up around it, or how much admission they ll charge to see it. I have no desire to see the disembodied acquisition seated in an alien environment; I have no intention to patronize the thugs who worked backroom deals, twisted arms and wielded dirty money to take what they had no claim to. Like the void left by an old friend turned away, The Awakening lies as a monument to corruption, a face that I will never look on again: dead to me.