Living Will-Washington: Fill & Download for Free

I live in the US. This is always a hard question for me.There are states I am more ideologically suited for. Those tend to be the so-called blue states. Unfortunately for me, I have two big problems:I hate the cold. I hate winter. If winter died and disappeared forever, I wouldn’t mourn it, except insofar as it would have devastating ecological consequences.I’m extremely sensitive to cost of living. Maybe there’s a rational reason. Maybe it’s the fact that I was so very poor for so long. But, when push comes to shove, I’m simply not willing to spend much for the privilege of living in one of those destinations that tend to be popular with people my age.If money weren’t an issue, I would probably end up somewhere in Washington State, in a city with 100–250K inhabitants. But just looking at the price of houses there is enough to give me heartburn.The result is that, until I consider myself independently wealthy—to me, that means working because I want to rather than because I have to—where I live will almost always be a function of what the local job market and cost of living look like.

This is a fascinating question.I suspect that the city we know as “Washington D.C.” will probably remain the capital of the United States for a very long time. Washington D.C. was specifically built with the express purpose to be our nation’s capital. Its location was deliberately chosen to put it in the middle of the country’s territory at the time and in a territory of its own that was not part of any state.Today, all the important federal buildings and monuments are in Washington D.C.: the White House, the Capitol Building, the Supreme Court Building, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Smithsonian Institute, the National Archives Building, the Library of Congress, etc. If the capital were moved, many of these buildings would have to be relocated to the new capital.Since there is currently no major organized movement to move the capital someplace else, Washington D.C. will probably remain our capital for at least the next two hundred years or so, assuming our country is around for that long.ABOVE: Photograph of the national mall in Washington D.C. with the Capitol Building, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the SmithsonianNonetheless, even though I suspect Washington D.C. will remain our capital for quite some time, I do think it is possible that the federal district’s name may change. Right now, the district’s full name is “Washington, District of Columbia.” It is named after two people: George Washington and Christopher Columbus. As I explain in this article I published in October 2018, Christopher Columbus was quite an unpleasant character and not the sort of person we should really be naming cities after. As Columbus’s reputation is being reappraised, there may be a movement to rename Washington D.C. to something else.George Washington is less controversial than Columbus, but he is still controversial in some ways because he owned slaves. Additionally, having the nation’s capital be called “Washington” is somewhat confusing, since there is also the state of Washington. I therefore think it is possible that, at some point in the future, Washington D.C. may be given a new name.It is hard to say what Washington D.C. may be renamed as, if it is renamed at all. It is possible that it may eventually be renamed “District of the Capitol” or something like that to avoid the controversial name of Columbus and the confusing name of Washington while still retaining the abbreviation “D.C.”ABOVE: Presumed portrait of Christopher Columbus. The District of Columbia is named after Columbus. As Columbus’s reputation is reappraised, the name of the district may be changed.Now, the real question is not whether our capital will be relocated in the relatively near future, but rather whether it will ever be relocated at all. When it comes to this question, it is hard to give a clear answer. It certainly seems to us as though Washington D.C. will always be the capital of the United States, but we must remember that “forever” is a long time.To people living in the Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus (ruled 27 BC –14 AD), it probably would have seemed as though the city of Rome would be the capital of the Empire forever. In 286 AD, however, the emperor Domitian set up four regional capitals: Nicomedia, Mediolanum, Sirmium, and Trevorum. The capitals moved around a bit over the next century or so. Eventually, by the time of traditional date of the fall of the western Roman Empire in 476 AD, there were two capitals; the capital of the western Empire was Ravenna in northern Italy and the capital of the eastern Empire was Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul).We cannot exclude the possibility that something similar may eventually happen to the United States. Eventually, there may cease to be a single federal capital altogether and various regional capitals will exist instead. For instance, Chicago may end up being the capital of the Midwest, Los Angeles the capital of the West Coast, New York City the capital of the Northeast, and Houston the capital of the South.ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the division of the Roman Empire under DiocletianIt is hard to say how long the city of Washington D.C. will be inhabited. Cities like Athens, Rome, Istanbul, and Damascus have all been continuously inhabited for thousands of years. It is quite likely that the cities of the United States will outlive the United States as a nation-state. Ultimately, of course, the United States will inevitably come to an end and, eventually, Washington D.C. will be abandoned and fall into ruins, as all cities will eventually. It is impossible to say how soon this will happen, though.

Washington, D.C., will not expand in size in terms of land area. There’s nowhere for it to go without moving into land that belongs to Maryland and Virginia. As for it being “a little too small,” it’s a little small for what, exactly?The District is growing in population, but there are ways to accommodate that that have nothing to do with acquiring more land, namely building more housing on already-available land and building taller housing. We may eventually see a relaxing of the building-height restriction in certain parts of the city, although it’s probably unlikely unless density really picks up. There are enough suburbs around the District (such as Northern Virginia and Silver Spring) to support people who work but don’t live in D.C. (many people work in Virginia or Maryland but live in D.C.; I do). There’s no reason for D.C. to expand in land size. It exists to house the federal government, and it does that just fine.