He was sitting at the bar of the Fairmont Hotel.  He was drinking for diversion. He was thinking for himself.

It was pure kismet that I sat down next to him.  We had both just come from the Mall.  He from the Lincoln Memorial end and me from the Smithsonian Institution end.  I had no problem finding a parking place on the mall.  He found it difficult to park.  I joked with him that he parked on the wrong end.

It wasn’t until the day before that it dawned on me that the day I planned to visit the Smithsonian was the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I”ve got a dream” speech.  It struck me as a bad idea, but it really didn’t turn out to be a problem at all.  There were a lot people walking around, mostly overweight, wearing t-shirts with similar themes about “honor” and funny camo hats with American flags sticking out of their heads like horns.  They were all white.

It struck me that it made little sense to wear a camouflage hat with flags stuck into them, as the flags defeated the point of the camo. 

When I talked to the guy at the bar, he explained that he was deeply frustrated with the demise of his lifestyle.  He loved the country, he told me, but not the government.  Aside from the fact that Obama and the Democrats were evil incarnate, many of his complaints are the same I write about, and other comment about, here.  He was an unremarkable looking man of a certain age.  About my age.  He was happy, polite and courteous.  He was civil and respectful.  He knew what was wrong, and he thought he knew how to fix it.

The answer was common sense.  Politicians were all in it for themselves, and were selling our legacy for votes to the great mass of people out there who wanted a free ride on the backs of hard working people.  He was suffering.  Money was tight, and people no longer respected the norms and mores by which he lived his life.  Why was he forced to live in some world that seems foreign to him.  What about his freedom to live his life?  What happened to his right to pursue happiness?

He had nothing against blacks, or Jews. He wasn’t too clear about Muslims, given what they did to this country, but it wasn’t a skin color thing.  If African Americans wanted to stand beside him and lock arms in the pursuit of a better America, he would be proud to have them.  It wasn’t his fault that they didn’t join in.  Some of his best friends were black, once.  There weren’t too many where he lived.

I like him. He was friendly and sincere.  I asked some nuanced questions about how it all fits together, how politicians function and navigate between different, conflicting interests.  He waved me off.  It wasn’t that complicated, or at least it didn’t have to be.  All they had to do was the right thing.  They just needed to use some common sense.

He told me that I was being fed misinformation, twisted stories about the country, the world, the tea party.  They were just regular folk trying to stand up for their life before it was completely lost.  It was happening, he explained.  Inch by inch, normal American life was being chipped away, and we couldn’t tell as it happened because the chips were so small.  But look back and you could see how we’ve slipped from a once honorable nation into the abyss. Our greatness was squandered.

He had a kid who was in the service.  His son was a Marine in Afghanistan on his third tour.  Because of this, he knew things that others didn’t.  He knew about the threat of terrorism.  He knew about honor and dedication to his country.  He knew about sacrifice.  He didn’t exactly say it, but it was clear that by having a son in harm’s way, he was entitled to a louder say than those who took from society without giving back.  He was more entitled to a say than I was.  His horse in the race was more important than mine.

I liked the guy.  He was like so many guys I’ve met in my life, at the store, in the courthouse, at classic car shows.  But for his t-shirt and the hat he had removed and placed next to his beer, he would have been pretty much any ordinary guy I’ve ever met in my life.  He believed, deeply, that the answer could be found in common sense.  He stood on the Mall in the very hot sun with a lot of other people who wore similar t-shirts and hats, and listened to Glen Beck and Sarah Palins, both of whom had common sense.

I was on the other end of the Mall, where there was no common sense or simple solutions.  He wore a “Hope” t-shirt.  I saw the Hope diamond.  We were very close, but couldn’t have been farther apart.  And still, he was a perfectly ordinary guy.

I picked a heck of a day to visit our Nation’s capital.