Kerry McQuisten’s Common Sense Sanctuary

Let’s talk reflecting pool. Warren G. Harding built it on swampland and the structure beneath it would have been fine - if it had been built on stable ground. The whole thing started sinking slowly. Presidents all the way up through Carter kept trying to prop it up with little cement pours, and regularly draining and cleaning it. Algae was a problem even then because there was no real circulation system. No pumps. No filters. Reagan added some more concrete, realizing the entire pool was now 12 or 13 inches lower than it should be. It had sunk over a foot and pulled loose from its structure. Clinton publicly acknowledged that the entire pool needed demolished and rebuilt, and that it would take hundreds of millions of dollars to do it right. The Bushes just kept trying to plug leaks and clean it. Every time they had to drain and scrub the thing, it cost around $100,000 to do so. George W. Bush actually had plans drawn up to rebuild it.  Obama decided to revise and execute the Bush renovation, which was needed, but it was flawed, and he spent tens of millions of dollars on it. He raised the pool up with a timber under-structure so the water ended up being even shallower, which means that’s the point at which the water started getting warmer. He also turned off the chlorinated city water supply into the pool and began pumping water in from the tidal basin - that’s the somewhat stagnant water that comes in from the Potomac River and surrounds the Jefferson Memorial. There was algae before, but with those changes came even more algae. Obama‘s reasoning was that the basin water would be cheaper instead of using the city water supply. He had the pool tiles removed from the bottom and another layer gray cement put in place along with gray-tinted reflective paint, which gradually faded away. By the time Trump’s first term came around, the cleaning had to be done every three or four months, some of the Obama structural repairs were failing, and the leaks were rampant again. By the time Biden got into office, Obama’s reflecting pool fixes were cracked and the pool was leaking hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of gallons of water. Biden opted to clean the pool, but performed little maintenance, and did no substantial refurbishment. Trump’s fix was to try something that the other presidents hadn’t. Whereas Obama had used a gray reflective paint and cement, Trump tried a combination sealant liner - it isn’t paint. Those sealants are similarly light-reflective to what Obama used. Trump switched up to blue from the dark gray. He added nanobubblers. When we walked around it the other day, there was only a small patch on the middle of the left side that may have been coming up. It was too windy and stormy to see why. It was not as if the sealant was coming up all over the pool and floating to the top because it wasn’t. We did see the algae cleaning going on and the crews, you could tell, were tired of being harassed for doing their jobs.  Vandals have damaged the grass, they’ve cut into the liner in other places and the knife lines are clear in the videos. We did see the National Guard soldiers coming in. We also saw them placed around the America 250 construction area and in between the museums. Five vandals have been arrested since we walked through. It’s unbelievable to me that they want to destroy something we could all enjoy out of hatred for a president whose policies they don’t even understand.  And the mainstream media is reprehensible. They aren’t reporting. They’re spinning propaganda as usual.

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