Commentary

Just shy of 30 years before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln was grappling with severe melancholy, often telling those around him that he was thinking about suicide and wandering in the woods alone with his gun. On two separate occasions, those around him became so concerned that they took Lincoln in, cared for him, and kept him safe through his crises. Imagine how different our country — and the world — would look today if Lincoln’s loved ones had not intervened. And he was only one person.

Like so many aspects of pre-pandemic life, COVID-19 continues to reshape how we think of education in radical and unexpected ways. Nowhere has this been more relevant than in the field of summer learning. Owing to the historic challenges and opportunities posed by the virus, summer learning providers engaged an unprecedented number of students with meaningful learning experiences and provided essential services to the young people who needed it most. Over 120,000 Maryland public school students attended summer learning programs between June and September of 2021, amounting to the largest expanded learning initiative in the state’s history.

s the COVID-19 pandemic continues to devastate the United States, young adults are facing the consequences of becoming emancipated from foster care. Once a young person turns 18 years old, they are legally no longer a child and cannot be considered as a foster placement. Those who age out of foster care must adjust to living independently and facing a great deal of adversity. They are expected to move out and start their lives on their own amid an ongoing pandemic.

The Hogan administration has launched the first steps to recoup roughly $220 million in funds from Maryland’s mental health and addiction treatment providers. The recoupment of these funds is unfair and dangerously destabilizing to Maryland’s public behavioral health system. The Hogan administration selected Optum as the vendor to manage the state’s Administrative Services Organization, which pays claims for publicly funded mental health and addiction treatment. Optum’s claims processing system launched in 2020 and promptly failed, causing MDH to issue advances – or estimated payments – for a seven-month period that overlapped the disruption and chaos caused by the onset of COVID-19.

Our trade imbalance with China and others has compounded to a cumulative value that rivals our national debt. We layer on tens of thousands of pages of regulations on our businesses (wage, safety, environmental) and allow, in the name of “free trade,” our foreign trading partners to avoid these costs. China plows its profits into the military and industrial base that we will have to counter to defend Taiwan from intimidation and threatened invasion.

As officials in Carroll County government continue their work to preserve 100,000 agricultural acres it is a good time to reflect on the history of master planning in the county and the community leaders who have worked hard to provide us with the firm foundation we have today, which allows us to confidently plan our future. Then again, when it comes to master planning, leadership is something that comes quite naturally to our county. We have a history of excellence. It is a story that needs to be told over and over again. Portions of this discussion have been published before.

Regarding the May 29 news article “India falls back on coal as searing heat fuels power crisis”: So, India is burning more coal to generate the electricity needed for air conditioning during a “historic” heat wave. Talk about irony! But let’s not throw stones at India; far too much of the rest of the world — the United States included — lives in glass houses. The train wreck of climate change is no longer moving in slow motion, and we will increasingly be burdened with mitigating its effects (coastal flooding, forest fires, heat waves), sometimes taking, as India has, counterproductive measures to do so.

Inflation is up, the job market is tight, and oil markets are volatile: These indicators seem, for the moment, to be the key factors determining the United States’ well-being. But they will shift substantially in a matter of months or years. In the meantime, seemingly no one pays attention to the long-term picture, which has remained alarmingly consistent. The nation has made promises to its elderly that it cannot possibly keep while continuing to do right by younger generations. That the country has muddled through so far is a testament only to the fact that the worst has not yet hit.