Commentary

A new elementary school is set to open this month in my end of Annapolis. It’s a yellow brick road to better education, I suppose. This $39 million edifice replaces old Hillsmere Elementary, a red-brick monument to ideas about education that are fading away in Maryland. When it opened in 1967, students stayed put in their seats, facing straight ahead to chalkboards and teachers’ desks.

As discomfiting as the “Free Kevin Brown” debacle proved to be — including a happy-to-be-back statement issued under the Orioles announcer’s name that read suspiciously like the work product of a soulless corporate AI computer (”John Angelos and I have a solid dialogue based on mutual respect…”) — the suspension of the well-regarded play-by-play man was far from the most troubling news to filter out of Camden Yards in recent days.

“Gun shots make everybody deaf and blind,” writes Jason Reynolds in his book, “Long Way Down.”It’s been more than a month, and we still do not know who committed what has been called the largest mass shooting in Baltimore history, at Brooklyn Homes. In “Long Way Down,” Reynolds suggests that neighbors avoid telling the police what they witness, fearing that they might become the next gun violence victim from a potential revenge shooting.

The other day I was scrolling Twitter (now called X, a dumb thing I will never get used to), and read a thread by professor and Christian podcaster Heather Thompson Day that was both familiar and terrifying. She told the story of a man who followed her in his car while she was on a prayer walk. He then materialized on a different street, “rolls down his window and asks where I live. I just yell ‘NO SIR’ because I was terrified but also still felt the need to be polite,” Day wrote.

DEK: Decisions have set county on an unsustainable path. Let’s look at the work from home (WFH) trend. There are basically two sides. Many businesses have mandated “go back to the office” and return to life before the pandemic. Many workers say, “I’m never coming back into an office so just pay me as you did before COVID but now I’m doing it from wherever I want with no windshield time.”