Mr. Cox Goes to Washington

It's official. Grit has fallen in love... at first sight, actually. (Sigh.) It happened yesterday: We were scrolling through news blogs, entertainment blogs, online quizzes—the kind of stuff you do when you're supposed to be working—when we came across this shot of the Lincoln Memorial on BuzzFeed. Jesus, is that some dude mowing the... wait, what the...? Is he mowing the lawn? And is that a South Carolina flag hoisted over his shoulder?! Swoon.

(Cue rom-com musical score, a crescendo of violins... or whatever—we're not music majors here at Grit.) 

Holy shit, we thought, this is it. Sticking with the film storyline metaphor, here we've been suffering through the heart-wrenching height-of-conflict part of the story, the how-will-this-ever-end stretch of the film—the dramatic shutdown with finger-pointing and hostile pressers and orange tape and Keep Out signs (or in the Notebook, when Noah and Ali are fighting outside his house... "So that's it? Was this some kind of a test I didn't pass?")—and out of it, emerges a Charleston guy with a lawn mower. Doing the work that the government says can't be done right now.

"Hey, no sweat," he says. "We'll do this ourselves," Or he would in the movie. Here's what he actually said: "We're trying to encourage Americans all over the country to go out and help fortify the boundaries of our monuments, our memorials... All these monuments are vulnerable right now to vandals—the wackos..."

Here in America, we haven't shut down. Not even close. This is how free people take care of their country.

Will there will be plenty saying this guy—full beard and a landscaping habit that won't quit—is the wacko? Sure as death and taxes. But at Grit, we take this route: Hundreds of full-grown, well-dressed, well-educated men and women are name-calling and scheming and playing cat-and-mouse with our public parks, monuments, and memorials (you know, like back when the neighborhood kids did when they built a fort... and we were seven). But we haven't shut down. Go ahead, get 'er done, Charleston.