The Monument at my bus stop

September 2, 2025

Every day on my commute from Hardy Middle School, I transfer buses next to a monument. For days, it was just part of the landscape—another piece of DC’s historical furniture that you notice but don’t really *see*.

But yesterday, something shifted.

Standing there waiting for my D10 connection, I really looked at the bronze figure towering above me: **Tadeusz Kościuszko**. The name carved into the base, along with “SARATOGA,” told a story I was finally ready to hear.

Kościuszko was a Polish military engineer who fought in the American Revolutionary War. His fortifications at Saratoga in 1777 helped secure one of the most pivotal victories for American independence. But here’s what makes his story remarkable—after helping establish American freedom, he returned to Poland to fight for Polish independence. And unlike many of his contemporaries, he was a passionate advocate for abolishing slavery and freeing enslaved people.

A freedom fighter who actually walked the walk.

Yesterday, as I stood in his shadow processing some difficult realizations about American history and mythology, the irony wasn’t lost on me. Here was a monument to an immigrant who “made it” in America—who helped create the very nation whose promises I’ve been questioning. Someone who fought for liberation while the country he helped establish continued to build its wealth on enslaved labor for another 100 years.

The monument didn’t change. My understanding did.

That’s the thing about daily landscapes—they become invisible until something inside you shifts, and suddenly you’re seeing complexity and contradiction where you once saw simple stone and bronze. Every day, I transfer buses next to this reminder of how complicated and layered truth can be.

There’s something both heartbreaking and hopeful about that daily encounter with Kościuszko. A reminder that the work of freedom is never finished, never simple, and sometimes the most important battles are fought by people whose names we barely notice carved in stone at our bus stops.

Today I’ll stand there again, waiting for my connection, seeing both the monument and everything it represents with new eyes.

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Sometimes the most profound lessons happen not in classrooms, but in the quiet moments when we finally notice what’s been there all along.