Thanks to my dad’s career, the Army was a huge part of my upbringing. When I was little, vaccinations, swimming lessons, and commissary shopping meant a trip to Fort Belvoir, Virginia. My elder brother followed in our father’s Army footsteps, becoming an Army helicopter pilot. My stepfather was in the Navy during World War II, serving on a submarine in the Pacific.

When I hit 18, when I was most likely to consider joining the military myself, even “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a few years away. If you were found to be gay, out you went. Poring over reams of court documents, during a college internship, regarding the murder of Naval officer Allen R. Schindler Jr., assured me that I was better off as a civilian. Schindler, who was gay and born the same year as me, was beaten to death by two shipmates during shore leave in Japan.

Personal safety aside, I’ve been a military booster, appreciating that the world’s most powerful military is commanded by a democratically elected civil servant. In principle, at least, that’s noble — even if so many of those commanders-in-chief have abused the position.

I’ve been thinking of our military daily as assorted bunches of the National Guard have joined my city’s landscape. While ICE and those other federal agents who support the current cruel and ill-advised immigrant-eradication effort fill me with rage, the Guardspeople evoke pity. Their ubiquitous presence in the District has cast an unsettling sheen of militarization, though I’ve not seen any of them doing much.

I imagine some think they have a legitimate purpose here, even if their role is arguably propaganda theater and nothing more. Whether someone joined to pay off student debt, for love of country, or whatever other reason, they likely expected to be assigned missions with an obvious purpose that helps the community — like providing aid after a disaster. Hanging out on a Metro platform in camouflage for hours is not that.

While my father’s history helps form my worldview, so does my mother’s. During my high school years, living in Florida, she and I were at EPCOT, a routine Sunshine State excursion. As we admired the well-kept gardens, empty trashcans, everything in its place to a Disney degree, she offered a warning. While my dad’s roots were Irish, hers were Swiss German. Thankfully, she was Baltimore-born, in an FDR-loving family, who housed a Jewish émigré couple during the war after they fled the Third Reich.

Being anti-Nazi, however, was not enough. Culturally, she cautioned, we might have an affinity for order, for the crisp, clean lines offered in this pretty, yet sterile, private playground. A little graffiti, she offered, was not such a bad thing, as unchallenged order is authoritarianism. Dora’s not a big talker, but every now and then she drops little bombs of wisdom.

In the decades since, I’ve come to realize she was spot on. Not long after that EPCOT outing, several friends tried to get summer jobs at the Magic Kingdom. If you looked the part, you were offered a guest-facing job, perhaps cashier at a giftshop. If you did not — overweight, acne, etc. — the offers were to work “backstage.” That might translate to out-of-sight kitchen staff. That tidy façade had victims, at least back then.

The Magic Kingdom is not a democracy. It is an autocratic security state. Read this line of their security statement in a clipped German accent — “Please note that we do not broadly discuss the specifics of our security procedures to avoid compromising their effectiveness” — and it comes clear, happiest place on Earth or not.

So, is our city safer for this military showmanship? As a District resident, this presence is certainly more disturbing than comforting. So many of us who have lived in small places and moved to big ones, particularly LGBTQ folks, didn’t migrate to a metropolis for “law and order,” but for freedom. Freedom from a suffocating, discriminatory locale is our safety. As I meet with neighbors and activists for protests and plans to further resistance, “freedom” is not what we’re feeling. “Order” is not freedom.

The military presence should pull back to a normal degree, which is still all over the city. The Pentagon is less than five miles from the Capitol. We know the military is all around D.C. No need to be so overbearing about it. Same goes for ICE, though this band’s Time of Terror will likely run as long as slimy Stephen Miller haunts the Oval Office.

If and when the political pendulum swings back, current MAGA moves underscore one truth about Washington: We must have statehood.

With their measure of oversight over the whole of the District, plenty of congresspeople have gone out of their way to score political points at our expense. Most recently, Rep. Nancy Ma(li)ce attacked Mayor Bowser with an ignorant and insulting line of questioning regarding “gender madness.”

Why, oh why, for example, does the D.C. Code use the phrase “birthing people” in reference to PEOPLE WHO GIVE BIRTH? Some transgender men give birth. Some nonbinary people give birth. Some women give birth. They’re all “birthing people.” You must be broken in some way to be offended by efforts for greater inclusivity. After all, the D.C. Code, which represents the will of Washingtonians, not Congress, specifically includes gender identity and expression in its antidiscrimination protections.

Beyond the televised bluster — p.s. oh, my God, those crazy cross earrings! — Mace is attacking us legislatively by introducing the “No DEI in DC Act.” Among its many fun features, her hateful bill, if passed, “Dismantles the DEI bureaucracy: Abolishes 16 taxpayer-funded offices and commissions, including the Office of Racial Equity, the Commission on Reparations, the Office of LGBTQ Affairs, and the Commission on Health Equity.”

Coming from someone who challenged gender norms among the Citadel’s Corps of Cadets, who was allegedly a victim of sexual assault, how does she not understand that people are sometimes treated unfairly by institutions? And that trying to undo that damage is a social good?

Whether it’s Trump using the District as his sandbox to play with soldiers or grandstanding politicians holding us hostage, D.C. statehood is obviously overdue. The District, as spelled out in our Constitution must merely be resized again. Once, it meant lopping off a chunk for Virginia. Today, it means shrinking the border to contain the Capitol Complex and the White House. The rest, where Washingtonians live, must be our state.

Will O’Bryan is a former Metro Weekly managing editor, living in D.C. with his husband. He is online at www.LifeInFlights.com.