Commentary

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.

In mid-April, a nonpartisan coalition of Maryland transit advocates representing more than 30 groups statewide sent out a questionnaire to candidates for governor asking them what their plans might be for public transportation. The questions ranged from the enforcement of Baltimore bus lanes to greater use of electric vehicles and expanding MARC commuter rail service. The results fell almost precisely along party lines. Seven of the nine Democrats running for the office pledged to support transit including Baltimore’s east-west Red Line, the $2.9 light rail system that Gov. Larry Hogan derailed in his first term. The Republicans? Silence.

If it was a white kid who had so angrily banged my driver-side window that I thought it was going to shatter, I would have unhesitatingly laid into that son of a gun with a few choice words. But it was a Black kid, and I said nothing. I did not want to offend. I just bit my tongue and prayed for the light to change. Can an old white dude complain about squeegee kids without sounding racist? Probably not. I mean, the African American grandmother of my friend’s multiracial son finds these street-corner hucksters irritating too. So, there’s that.