The Washington Post has been chronicling the effect of this watershed act for more than a year. Today's installment returns to East Capitol Dwellings, one of the inner-city neighborhoods that served as the law's inspiration and that will now serve as its great proving ground. The hard part isn't getting a job. It's keeping it. This fall, as she risks her children's well-being to keep working, as she dreams of being a D.C. police officer, her handhold on the socioeconomic ladder threatens to give way.
Children brake their bikes and stare.
She is fighting sore thighs, and 25 to 1 odds, to train for the physical aptitude test required to become a D.C. cop. She is also sweating, a year after leaving public assistance, to solve a puzzle lawmakers on the other end of East Capitol Street have left unfinished. She will throw herself at fences instead. She'll turn her palms into a crosshatch of chain-link. Down this way, they sometimes do.