Protest coverage is personal for columnist: 'The Michigan Capitol is my campus quad'

January 18, 2021, 2:01 PM
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(Photo: WXMI)

Graham Couch, who normally covers games and athletes for the Lansing State Journal, was among journalists at the state Capitol on Sunday in case a political protest became a big deal.


"That building is the centerpiece of our community and part of its heartbeat," writes Graham Couch. (Photo: Michigan State Police)

"I was home in time for the NFL playoffs, as it turned out, but the sportswriter tells why the sparsely attended event was unsettling anyhow.

The Michigan Capitol is my campus quad, the center of my universe for much of my life. I love that building.

... I hate seeing the Capitol fenced in. A threat to it is more than a threat to democracy or our legislative body. It's a threat to our backyard.

When I stand on the Capitol lawn, from one spot I can see the church I grew up in, the garden where my father’s ashes are buried, the church next door where I honed my extraordinary basketball skills and performed in a musical as a teenager. I can see the different buildings where my dad worked for four decades and my wife's office is now, and the building where I worked in college as a page — the Capitol.

That was pre-9/11 when you could stroll through the front doors as a shortcut or just because you wanted to look up in the dome. Back when security at the State of the State address meant an 18-year-old guarding the back entrance to the balcony of the House of Representatives — just above Gov. [John] Engler’s head — with a flashlight and a walkie-talkie.

Those were better days than these.

"Let's hope for a similarly uneventful week," Couch writes after his weekend duty at an 1878 national historic landmark he calls "the centerpiece of our community and part of its heartbeat."


Read more:  Lansing State Journal


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