In Defense of Washington

 After we moved here from Washington, D.C., people told me how lucky I was to leave all of the crowds and traffic behind.

That’s true, and I don’t have a desire to move back

I never expected to stay 50 years, but then I met this great preschool teacher and didn’t want to leave.

Here are some of the things that I liked about Washington:

—Public transportation is great. The Metro goes almost everywhere (except Georgetown) and the buses and taxis and Uber are very good. Trains and planes are convenient.

—There is free music everywhere. The military has choruses and bands. Museums host concerts. The Kennedy Center has a free show at Millennium Stage just about every day.

—The pomp and ceremony are unmatched, except in England: the Inaugural Parade, the Cherry Blossom Festival, the 21-gun salutes at Arlington National Cemetery.

—There are free museums galore. If you are local, you go late on a weekday, preferably in winter.

—There’s a wide selection of restaurants, and I don’t mean fast food.

—Doctors are more plentiful than in other cities.

—You run across a lot of interesting people. Some of them have dark secrets. “What do you do?” “Oh, I’m a consultant.” “What kind?” Perhaps a little too forward. “Homeland Security.” You get a look that says “If I tell you more, I will have to kill you.”

After all that time there, you may want to know what I think of the government. Well, I don’t like to get political in this column. I will say that a cousin once told me I was awfully naïve for a Washington journalist. I still don’t view these people as corrupt. Along with lazy bureaucrats, there are a lot of workaholic people who are driven to do their jobs.

Yes, there are too many lobbyists. But what do you expect when the government is hading out trillions of dollars ever year? Somebody is going to want it.

I do think there is a lot of waste and unnecessary spending. Congressional office buildings are too big and luxurious. When I covered the Commerce Department for two years, I used to walk down the hallways, look into offices and think, “What do these people do?” I never figured that out.

Locals disliked all the tourists, but I always felt these visitors were the government’s customers, with the right to look skeptically at what was being done with their tax money. A longtime business leader disagreed with that description. “They’re not customers,” he said. “They are the board of directors!”