Metaphor Alert

Monday morning, since I did not have anything to do, I took the Metro down to the Capitol, because my misreading of the map told me that the Capitol South station was the closest to the Jefferson Memorial.  (It wasn't; I should have been looking at the other Metro lines as well.)  If you have never been there, the U.S. Capitol is a really impressive building.  In pictures, it doesn't look so terribly different from many of the statehouses, which are generally modeled on it, but the scale is very different.

The top of the Capitol looks a bit odd, doesn't it?  Along with many other repairs and restoration projects, they are busy doing work on the Statue of Freedom that stands atop it.  

At the moment, she is not terribly visible, and unfortunately, I can't blame this all on Obama.  Some of this is the inevitable encroachment of the national government on our liberties over the last century or so.  Some of it is regrettable, and sometimes not even particularly sensible encroachments caused by the War on Terror.  (You do remember that we are still at war, right?)  But the Statue of Freedom is at least temporarily invisible up there.  We all have an obligation to do something about that.