Commentary

Maryland made a historic commitment for the fiscal year that began July 1: At least 40% of spending on climate change and green infrastructure — including renewable energy, public transportation, affordable housing, and environmental cleanup — needs to go to the 16% of communities who need it the most. That’s the opposite of how things often work. I grew up in Curtis Bay, a neighborhood in South Baltimore known for environmental injustice.

Charles Carroll of Carrollton wasn’t in Philadelphia when the Second Continental Congress voted to break from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, nor was he there on July 4 when Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence was ratified. He wouldn’t get there and add his name to the document’s signers for some weeks, but when it came to the idea that the 13 colonies must free themselves from England, he got there long before many of his fellow Marylanders.

A 20-year-old who is partying with friends learns that they want to rob a local drug dealer. He lends them his car and then goes to sleep after giving them the keys. A person is accidentally killed during that robbery and the 20-year-old is charged, not as an accessory to a robbery, but with the murder of the person who died during the robbery. The 20-year-old gets convicted of felony murder and is now sentenced to life imprisonment.

When my first children’s book on civics — “How the U.S. Government Works” — was published in 1998, I began doing book talks in schools, libraries, book stores, and fairs. Inevitably, at least one person in the crowd would see the title of the book and say something to the effect of: “This guy must be nuts. He actually thinks the U.S. government works!”

There’s a saying among cult experts: Nobody ever joins a cult. Of course, people join what, to outsiders, certainly appear to be cults — the Branch Davidians, the Moonies, the Peoples Temple and so on. But these groups never describe themselves as cults, and they don’t necessarily understand themselves that way, either.

Last month, at a pro-choice rally in my hometown located 20 minutes north of New York City, my mother took the megaphone for the first time in her life and said “I’ve had two abortions.” I had known this about my mother since childhood, who would mention the abortions to me and my sister in passing, without explanation or shame. Abortion was part of what allowed my family to be a tight-knit quartet, and this knowledge existed somewhere in the back of each of our minds without ever having to be explicitly said.

It is my second Pride in Baltimore. Since the pandemic shut down festivities for two years, I decide to live-sketch the event, on-site. Ten minutes into my first sketch, I realize how nothing could prepare anyone to sketch in such a loud, chaotic, beautiful atmosphere. I drop pens while trying to switch colors as colorful people strut by. I stub my pencil’s nib and then my toe. I blink sweat out of my eyes and watch it drop onto the page.

Within hours of the news that more than 50 migrants had died in the back of a tractor-trailer near San Antonio on Monday, the men, women and children having been baked alive in the blistering Texas heat, anti-immigrant Republicans quickly descended into blaming President Joe Biden. Not because he had anything directly to do with this disaster, this act of mass torture, this surreal tragedy; this was clearly the work of human traffickers taking advantage of desperate people willing to risk everything for a new life in the United States.