Commentary

Do you remember when Christmas shopping involved leaving your house? When you could walk around a downtown department store or perhaps the local mall and nobody kept tabs on you, noticed how often you visited certain outlets, what you looked at or what you didn’t look at? I do. It was glorious. Why, I could put a shopping list in my pocket and only I, the actual author of said shopping list, knew what was on it. Well, aside from Santa Claus or possibly the Lord Almighty. How cool was that? We called it privacy. What a quaint concept that was. It implied that while I might be well aware that I was in the market for a “Tickle Me Elmo” for one of the kids or a matching plaid scarf and mittens for the spouse or even fuzzy bedroom slippers for my mother-in-law, large anonymous corporations or their agents did not necessarily have to know.

You may have heard of Asiyah Timimi, an anti-violence activist in D.C. and mother of three sons. She has been in the news lately because of her advocacy and because each of her sons has been a victim of gun violence. Two of them are mostly recovered from their injuries, but the youngest, age 27, remains paralyzed after being shot in the spine last year. I met Timimi during a recent discussion about solutions to gun violence held at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in the District. She was advocating for better mental health services. Her son had become so depressed about being paralyzed, she said, that he would try to roll his wheelchair into oncoming traffic. “It’s not easy to get the mental health care that you need because the whole city is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said.

I came across something funny this week while researching the national and state implications of the Respect For Marriage Act, which recently passed the Senate and is expected to clear the House and then be signed into law by President Joe Biden any day now. Actually, maybe “funny” isn’t the right word for it still being necessary, in the year 2022, to codify the right of same-sex and interracial couples to be recognized as legally married in every state of the union. “Sad” is more like it.

Imagine this: A woman answers a knock at her door, and is greeted by community violence intervention workers who tell her that her grandson, whom she lives wih and who recently recovered from a gunshot, is thinking about retaliating. In fact, he’s said that he’s going to shoot the person who shot him. These workers had received a warning call from the woman’s son, who is currently serving a federal prison sentence, and is gravely concerned about both her safety and that of his own son.

Shortly before 6 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 24, the first 911 calls came in to Baltimore’s emergency communications center, warning that a house was on fire in the 200 block of South Stricker Street. More than one caller described it as vacant. Most noted there were flames shooting out of the top floors. One of the nine early morning callers claimed there were kids inside. Records show that firefighters arrived at the fire within minutes.

One of Donald Trump’s greatest achievements in office was his remaking of the American judiciary with the appointment of three outstanding Supreme Court justices and hundreds of lower court judges who defend the Constitution from the federal bench each day. But now, with just a few bizarre social media posts, Trump has repudiated that entire legacy.

In last month’s midterms, Republican House candidates have won about 54 million votes and Democrats have taken about 51 million — translating into a three percentage point advantage for the GOP. Some votes are still uncounted, but Democrats are not positioned to pull ahead in the final tally. Yet readers have bombarded me with tweets and emails, questioning whether these vote totals accurately measure which party Americans preferred in 2022.