Yesterday I spoke to a college student who spent all day Sunday in Washington D.C. attending museums by day and watching the Washington Wizards get slaughtered by the Golden State Warriors at the Verizon Center into the evening. He was very much impressed with how different D.C. was from Baltimore. But some things never change in America’s urban landscape. This is what he had to say:

“It was nice and clean, but there were a huge number of homeless guys, sleeping all over the place. The police did not hassle them at all. [Sounds like Homeless Eden.] Mack and Villie and I were walking buy this one little guy on the sidewalk outside of the Verizon Center. The man was in his mid-fifties with a white beard. He was small and thin. Mack is six-seven. This guy looks at Mack and says, “Hey White Dick, I’m a badass nigga taday!”

“It was so uncalled for, and so funny. The guy just kept walking. We were calling Mack, ‘White Dick’ all night long. Not only were there no bums getting hassled by cops, but the bums did not beg—not one request for change. They just slept.

“The most astonishing thing I think I ever saw was this one guy on a side street just screaming at this car, having a full on conversation with it. We really didn’t want to get close enough to hear exactly what he was saying. But he seemed to believe that the car was talking back to him.”

There you have a suburban Marylander’s view of D.C. If I were mayor of Baltimore I’d let our bums know how sweet it is down the road—even circulate a brochure—and start launching greyhound bus loads of Harm City panhandlers at the Capital of the World.