Commentary

One of the best gifts state and local lawmakers and teachers can give graduating high school students is a solid financial education. Michigan is poised to become the 14th state to mandate a personal finance course before students graduate high school. This should be a requirement around the country. Every student graduating from a public high school should have to take at least one semester of basic personal finance.

Even though I grew up an urban kid in downtown Annapolis, I was fascinated by wildlife. Spurred by accidentally learning about the Holocaust in sixth grade, I wanted to become an attorney and fight injustices. After graduating from law school in 1969, this led to my first real job with the National Wildlife Federation in Washington as an environmental advocate. Since then, I’ve engaged in a lifelong crusade to protect the natural world and all of God’s creatures. It has not been an easy path. Working for change, especially against entrenched economic interests, is fraught with difficult challenges.

A Blue Ribbon Task Force, created to examine the disgraced special education programs in Frederick County Public Schools, has made an understandable but tragic mistake. The group has decided that its meetings will not be open to the public. This is a group specifically formed to restore public confidence in the district’s special education programs after the U.S. Justice Department exposed severe problems in the way children were treated. The district was forced to sign a consent decree, pledging to improve.

This is the part of year for time travels of the personal sort as graduations, recitals, weddings, and other transitions take us into the moment, back down roads of memories, and forward into the hopes of those we care about. For a suspended few hours, we leave the world of today’s tumult and wander along paths almost covered with the weeds of history. Memories applied in the context of the dreams of an emerging generation sprout new blooms of hope in even the most worn and neglected gardens.

Even the most casual observer of current events has to admit there is much to be gloomy about. From public health (monkeypox and COVID-19 variants) to mass shootings (Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, among others) to the inability of opinion leaders to agree on basic facts (see the events of Jan. 6, 2021), there is a certain deficit of optimism of late. Throw in some election-year fearmongering on inflation, the stock markets and gasoline prices, and it does seem like the best way to cheer up might be to disconnect from all electronic devices.

A month before the Afghanistan government fell to the Taliban, the phone of a former Asymmetric Warfare Group soldier was already ringing nonstop as desperate interpreters he once worked with reached out for help. The retired sergeant major served several tours in Afghanistan where he relied on his interpreters to accomplish the mission. As it became evident the Taliban would assume control of the government, he feared for their lives and the safety of their families. Gonzalo Lassally, a former AWG integration troop sergeant major, wasn’t the only retiree from the unit receiving frantic calls and emails from Afghanistan.

Thirty years ago, I arrived at The New York Times as an intern. I never planned to be a “company man.” I had no real plan. This is just the way things worked out. Young people often ask me for career advice. Well, here it is. During a career conference at my college, I remember a journalist describing what I thought was an appallingly lower than average starting salary for newspaper journalists. Hyperventilating, I excused myself, ran to the bathroom and threw up. I had been poor my whole life, and I remember thinking, “I can’t go to college and still be poor!”